One thing that I just never seem to be able to remedy, is my unwillingness to stop playing when stuck - and my willingness to quit when I’m ahead. If I’m up for the session, my mind starts looking for excuses to stop. If I’m down, I absolutely abhor having to get up and walk away. What’s more, I’ve noticed that the sums involved are of no consequence, at least when I’m down for the session. If I’m stuck $1k or $1 doesn’t change how unwilling I am to quit playing.

And in the bottom of all this, I think I still have a case of “luck-will-change” disease. Somehow, I can’t get my subconcious to accept that just because I’ve won three all-ins in a row, it doesn’t mean that I’m any more or less likely to lose the next one. Or that just because I’ve had horrible luck for the past hour, it would be a big mistake to get up now since I’m “due.”

I don’t know what effects this has on my play. I presume it makes me wilder when I’m stuck and more careful when I’m ahead, but I don’t have any data to back that up, just a reasonable guess since I’m too concerned with getting it back in one case, and not upsetting the balance in the other.

I need to figure out a way to practise this. I tried, for awhile, to always play a set number of hands. This has the benefit of making the decision for me; I don’t end up playing throughout the night to try to win back any losses, and even if the first few hundred hands saw me on a crazy upswing, I wasn’t allowed to just get up and leave before my hands were done for the day. Unfortunately, it doesn’t solve the problem but only attempts to deal with the symptom (me playing the “wrong” number of hands, either too few or too many). In fact, it worsens the other symptom; if I set a goal of playing 800 hands, and I’m up a lot after 700 hands, I get nervous about losing some or all of it in the next 100 hands. Presumably, this has a negative impact on me.

Now, I don’t think I make outrageous mistakes when I’m on these types of tilts, and it’s not primarily to plug leaks that I want to be able to deal with this. I want to deal with it because it makes me uncomfortable and I’d much rather feel comfortable all the time when I’m doing something that I’m doing several hours a week. The fact that I might achieve better results as a consequence of being able to play more comfortably is only an added boon (although admittedly a very nice one).

Perhaps I’ll download - or create myself, more likely - a small program that I can set to ring an alarm after a random time. So that I put in maximum and minimum time to play, and it tells me to quit randomly in the interval between the two. But again, does this really address the problem? With a little luck, I suppose I might cure it just by virtue of not thinking about quitting myself, but letting my little program be responsible for that.

You know what? I really like this idea. I think I’ll code that program tonight! As a sidenote, if it takes me any more than 15 minutes from start to finished product, I should be ashamed of myself.