How to tilt away a #@$%-load from your bankroll playing a freeroll

It's been three days, so I can post this now.

So after spending this whole month thinking about my growing bankroll and reading alot of psycho-babble, this Saturday, all that reading and thinking got to me and... well read on.

By the middle of this month, I was wondering about what happened to raketherake's monthly freeroll at ukbetting, the one where I had won my biggest payout ever last month. I had cleared the required 250MPPs in Dec to be eligible for this month's freeroll. So it was a surprise that I finally get an email from RTR on Jan 24th announcing that they were going to hold the freeroll on Jan 27th instead of the usual middle of the month.

Well late is better than never, so I prepared as I did before and hoped for another good tourny. This month, there were 42 entrants... another good small field, with payout to the top 5.

First big thing I noticed was that they've changed the prize pool! Instead of £2500 like last month, it was only $2500. That's nearly a 50% reduction so that was sticking in the back of my mind.

I got some cards really early and by the ninth hand, I was the chip leader. And I stayed in the top 5 past the first hour break.

Then, FPS hit me. That's fancy playing syndrome for those who don't know. I made a move with nothing from the SB and was caught by a no foldem player. After telling myself and countless others the futility of bluffing in a freeroll, here I was 'making a move.'

Because of that ONE hand where I lost nearly half my comfortable stack, I was forced to play tighter, miss out on some hands that I woulda coulda played and woulda coulda won with flops that woulda hit me hard.

So I ended up 12th out of 42. Just missing the final table and 7 from the money.

All my reading and thinking, and NOT just playing some poker this month got to me.

If that was all, this wouldn't be a landmark post for me.

You see, my 'career winnings' right at that moment on Saturday was $6934.26. I was so close to $7K. With all this reading and thinking this month, I understood the psychology of why we gamble and play poker. I learned so much about cognitive biases and the mistakes people make with their financial decisions......

So a bit dejected, a bit tired, I login to my Littlewoods casino account where I HAD over £640...

And in less than 20 minutes tilted away all of it except for £2.90...

playing -EV blackjack.

Yup... that's over $1,250 gone. Just like that.

It certainly beats my last big tilt off of $713 last June, and again it was about 20% of my net winnings.

It's now three days later and believe it or not, I'm not feeling so bad... at least it's not affecting me as badly as last June's tilt off. It did make me miss the month end 50K freeroll at poker.com but in some ways, it has helped!

I think it's gotten me over the hump of worrying too much about the stakes that I'll risk at the poker tables and buy-in MTTs.

That $1,250 would have bought over 100 $10 MTT buy-ins, or worth 300BBs at the 2/4 tables... and these games should be +EV for me to play... so wasting that equity has actually got me slightly mad at myself... which is a good thing.

So let's see how long it'll take me to make this all back... last time, it took over 3 months before I got my bankroll back over the pre-tilt level.