Tiltboys in Vegas: Six Sigmas Out

Editor's note: the boring Sklansky concept of "implied odds" describes an expected payoff in the future, if you make your hand. For example, you might say "I didn't have pot odds to chase my flush draw, but I knew the calling station in seat 3 would call me down if I got there, so I had implied odds counting those expected extra two bets." As Rafe describes by example the Tiltboys have coined the much more interesting expression "implied tilt odds", which describes expected payoffs from a player's poor play after he goes on tilt. In an uncanny twist (or is it a canny twist?) Roy Cooke, a writer in Card Player magazine and somebody who the Tiltboys often succeed in earning implied tilt odds from (see later in trip report), unknowingly stole this concept from us and wrote it up in a recent Card Player article (Sept 22, 1995, p. 40). Of course, Cooke didn't call it implied tilt odds, but it was obvious what he meant, seeing as how the article appeared suspiciously soon after our trip, and after he had learned a lesson about implied tilt odds first hand, courtesy of the Tiltboys.