Accountant's Syndrome

Does anyone have a system in cash games where they have a set amount of money to make in a day, and once they've made that much they stop playing whether it takes 1 hour or 8 hours?

Dan Harrington calls this accountants syndrome.

I've started doing this because I seem to play too loosely when I have done well already, and have often carried on and lost the money I've made at the start of a session.

Do you think this is good are bad?

I agree in theory its not the best system but it seems to work well for me.

I do it when I've lost a certain amount (varies). I know I should keep playing if I'm playing well enough to recover, but something in me says "Stop before it gets worse." Sometimes I'll play for 45 mins and stop if I lose a buy-in too quickly. Not good.

Its a terrible way to play!

It causes people to chase losses, play longer when they are having off days and leads people into a results orientated mindset.

Over large samples, your winrate becomes consistent. Therefore a better strategy would be to play a set length of time or set amount of hands per day.

A non-poker example of how poor a strategy this is would be say an athlete attempting to break a world record. He has a training plan with set amounts of training and rest. If he performs poorly on a given day, he wouldn't train for a longer period as it would be counter productive. Likewise if he was having an exceptional training session, he wouldn't cut it short because he was doing better than expected at that point in time.

Umm it seems pretty silly to me. Sit and play for as long as you feel comfortable playing. Setting stop-losses is a sensible idea for many people because of the tilt problems that can result from a bad session, but setting what effectively are stop-gains seems ridiculous. What do you do if...

- You're sat at a table with 5 fish who are throwing money at you, but you just hit your 'stop-gain'?

- You have a bad session and 12 hours after sitting down you're still breaking even?

- You sit down and play decently for a while but after an hour or two begin to feel tired/hungry/restless?

Poker is one long session, not 3489673893 different short ones. Remember this! It seems like you're suffering from a not-too-uncommon problem of treating your winnings as if they're not real money and hence throwing them around and hence invariably losing them. Remember that it's actualy money you're playing with - whether you started with it or have won it. Doubling that $100 buyin doesn't just mean you have twice the amount of pretend virtual chips and a number by your screenname that's twice what it was 5 minutes ago, it means a meal for two at a decent restaurant, or whatever.

Some people tend to get overly tight when they think of their chips as real money and not just a number and some pictures on the internet, but it's something that might work for you if you find yourself playing too loosely and haphazardly.

I seem to tilt in cash games though when I'm doing well not when I'm doing badly.
Its when I'm really well at the start of a session I normally start playing badly. I just get overconfident and go loose aggressive playing too many hands.
Fact is if I'd just quit at a set profit in the past I would be up by much more than I am.

Then you must address the problem. The problem is not playing after you have made $X, the problem is you are tilting and not doing anything to change the psychological state that causes this.

Maybe I should take a break for 15 to 20 minutes whenever I've won a couple of big hands to collect my thoughts, and that might help to stop it.