Tilt Demon - Stop Loss Tilt Prevention, How much WOULD you have saved!

dvdfan

Hello,

I'm releasing some new software very soon, the website is at www.tiltdemon.com but thats not in public beta yet for a few days but in the meantime im releasing a program that connects to your holdemmanager database and tells you how much you would have won/lost if you applied a stop/loss system and stopped playing when you:

Were losing -$300 (or any amount you specify)
Were winning +$300 (or any amount you specify)
You reached 1000 hands (or any amount you specify)
You played for more than 1.5 hours



Now the idea for this came from my own tilt issues, im not a bad tilter as in i dont play while drunk, or shout or roar or throw the cat at the dog or anything but when im on a losing run too often it turns into a shocking 6+ buyin downswing simply because i stop playing my A game and im continuing to play the rest of that session at a -bb/100 rate. However much i knew i was tilting i couldnt stop and kept going until i won something back, this occassionaly worked but more often than not the opposite happened and i turned a mole into a mountain.

I did manage to restrict my games to 2 hour sessions which helped alot but i still have trouble stopping sometimes specifically when im down as i hate finishing on a negative. I know from reading various forums this is a big problem for alot of people so i decided to start this project.

Quite ironically i also find that when im up a couple of buyins im actually playing -EV which was a surprise, its not something i was even aware of but in heinsight i do tend to take more risks and also lose interest when im running good so i do advise checking your bb/100 when your up 2,3 or 4+ buyins as you maybe surprised.

So the idea of this saving calculations software is to let you experiment and see when your 1) wining/losing 2) playing for long periods or 3) playing alot of hands per session if your bb/100 is good or bad. It should tell you whether its profitable or not to continue playing in those situations so feel free to try it out to see if its a leak. btw a session is defined as any group of hands where there was no consecutive break of more than 1 hour between each hand. I set it at 1 hour because i really feel this is the minimum time you need to forget about the last session and feel like your starting fresh.

You can download this software via the website www.tiltdemon.com/savings.html



The site is still under construction in other areas but the savings calculator should work fine. All the instructions are at that site. As you can see below it highlights each session that exceeded our limit, shows the start and end time of the session, the hand that triggered the exceed, the total hands played after the exceed and finally the total lost/won after the exceed in $ and also bb/100 which is basically what we would have won/lost had we had a stop/loss system in place.

Now i'm not saying you should just stop playing for the day as ive heard people say if i stopped playing everytime i had a downswing id lose a fortune on rake, thats not what im saying, if you can play through a long or losing/winning session and the calculator shows your making close to the same bb/100 you make on average then its fine to keep playing. But if your win rate is still positive but only half your normal winrate by rescheduling and doing something else like bringing the dog for a walk and then play poker after an hour break you should return and be able to double the bb/100 rate compared to the winrate you could have won had you continued to play when you weren't on your A game. If your running at a negative bb/100 when you exceed any of those limits then its certainly a big potential leak assuming the sample size is reasonable. I'm sure there are cases due to family commitments or work commitments where your poker hours are limited but for the most part we all have some leeway in when we can play to a certain extent. Whether you want to continue to play when your losing money is up to you, if you don't want to continue to lose then read on.



The Solution

Now if you find your bb/100 is suffering when your exceeding one of the stop/loss limits then the best way to eliminate that leak is to stop when this happens. However the compulsion to keep playing and recover losses is extremely difficult to overcome for a lot of people. If your one of those people then the software we will be releasing should be a big help.

Now this software isn't groundbreaking, many respected posters and poker players have written tons of articles on how tilt can affect your game, this software just makes it easier to stop. Im sure there are some players that will have no use for this software as they have already conquered tilt or there tilt isnt directly related to long sessions or losing session but i know for myself and many others out there it is a big problem.

Basically what our software does is track your win/loss, hands played and time played. You configure a stop loss that you want to stop playing when you exceed that figure, that could either be an amount won/lost like -$300 or 1000 hands played or 1.5 hours played.

When you exceed the applicable stop/loss our software will allow you 4 mins to close your tables and if you don't close down within that time it will automatically close the poker client. (you can specify which username and pokersites you can be excluded for)

Now i know some sites have a 12 hour exclusion or week long exclusion but our software aims to give you as much control as possible, if you feel you need 1 hour break when tilting then you set it to 1 hour, if you need 3 hours then set that, as soon as that time passes it will allow you to play. This is extremely important for players who rely on rake and want to be able to exclude themselves but come back and play again when tilt subsides.

If you attempt to play before the excluded time it will not allow you. We've put in place a lot of controls that prevent you bypassing the lockout by changing the time/changing databases/trying to uninstall etc while still allowing you to continue to use your computer interrupted. There are possibly situations we haven't considered but well catch those during beta and patch them up but our main concern is that its not easy to bypass but if there was a program that couldn't be stopped or killed somehow then it would be the ultimate virus so we obviously don't want to create that but most average PC users will find it extremely hard to bypass this to the point the exclusion period will probably be over before they get near to figuring it out.

Again you can choose the site your locked out, you might have a separate account you just keep a few bob for playing tournaments in, if so then don't add this site and if you tilt and get locked out you can still blow off a few bob on the other site. Our aim is to give you as much control as possible.

Theres other details on the website if you want to check it out further and if you want to beta test it please visit our forums www.tiltdemon.com/forum and look for the beta testers thread.

This version is only compatible with Holdem manager however well have a poker tracker version available soon too.

For anyone that dosent me from posting here im sure some of the guys at holdem manager could vouch for me as i worked for them for over a year if your worried about downloading from a newbie which i know is a concern for any poker player.

Id be very interested to hear what trends people are finding with the savings calculator or if they're are any bugs, heres my findings but i'm sure depending on your tilting tendencies other peoples may differ a lot

At 100nl over 100k+ sample where i ran over +5bb/100 for the total sample
stop loss (-$300) i was -2bb/100
stop loss (-$250) i was +3bb/100
stop loss (-$200) i was +6bb/100
stop loss (-$150) i was +6.7bb/100
stop loss (-$100) i was +8.7bb/100
stop loss (-$50) i was +8.5bb/100


stop loss (+$300) i was -2.5bb/100
stop loss (+$200) i was -2bb/100
stop loss (+$150) i was +0.57bb/100
stop loss (+$100) i was +1bb/100
stop loss (+$100) i was +2.5bb/100

So in my example its pretty obvious the more i win the poorer my game becomes (as i mentioned due to being overly aggro and willing to gamble more and also i feel i lose interest/concentration rather than when im breakeven or losing a small amount and trying to turn it into a winning session i concentrate more but i just didnt realise the extent of this before this calculator) and also i can play good up until i lose 2 buyins, after that point i suspect i begin to feel frustrated as ill struggle to make it a winning session and start to drop my levels, however been aware of this might help me that i know when i reach the -$200 threshold i need to compose my concentration or stop playing and possibly set my limit at -$250 and keep an eye on how i do between -$200 and -$250 and if i continue to run at +3bb and dont improve then its better to decrease my stop level to -$200 as i can play better than 3bb/100 when im concentrating fully and ironically i seem to concentrate better when i have a small loss and im trying to turn it into a winning session.

Now that was during a time i felt i controlled tilt by restricting my sessions to 2 hours max most of the time but i hadnt realised how obviously + or - 2 buyins were effecting my winrate, previous to that i often played 2-5 hours sessions. So you should use a similar approach to find the threshold where your win rate starts to decrease. You can also use the time and hands feature as well as this can be very useful too.

After we've completed this project and added as many useful features as possible we plan to move onto a more complicated Tilt Prevention tool where it imposes a lockout based on actions. Each bad action would incur a pretilt point, you then decide what each action costs, so calling a 3bet with 67s vs a tight 3betting villain = 1pt and calling a 4bet all in with AT vs a tight 4better would result in 3pts, when you reach 4.5pts then the software locks you out. You get the picture but the idea would be to prevent tilt before you get to that 2-3 buyin loss, or before you start getting tired and stop concentrating, so if there is enough interest this is something well start to develop in the near future when we've completed the Tilt Demon Development fully.

Ill be away for a couple of hours but ill try to respond to any questions later when i get back

brianmc

Innovative line on plugging leaks. WP

good luck with this

zuutroy

Im getting 'provider does not support property' when connecting to the DB

bohsman

Cliffs?

TommyGunne

Data source not found and no default driver specified.

I'm probably doing something retarded though.

Really good idea though!

ZZR1100

You can download this software via the website www.tiltdemon.com/savings.html

link broken ... working now

data source name not found and no default driver specified

Zab

I was considering making the report side of this (for my own use) a few years ago. I didn't get the idea myself, I found it knocking around a couple of forums.

Personally, I have zero interest in the automatic lockout side of things, but the report would be interesting. I'll assume it's easy to use the application just for its reporting function. However, I play over multiple sites that report times in different zones. HM has yet to implement a conversion matrix for this, and without such a matrix the results are going to be skewed. Have you considered putting one directly into your software?

dvdfan

Has anyone with the errors followed those steps? If yes let me know and ill look into it

Step 1)
First verify if you have psqlODBC installed on your computer as this is needed to run the program. Also if your getting any errors please let me know exactly what step the error occurred as it will help solve it quickly.

Windows XP: Go to control panel > Add & Remove Programs and look a program called psqlODBC, if it is installed skip to step 3 otherwise follow the instructions in step 2.

Windows Vista: Go to control panel > Programs & Features and look a program called psqlODBC, if it is installed skip to step 3 otherwise follow the instructions in step 2.

Step 2)
Go to http://www.postgresql.org/ftp/odbc/versions/msi/ and click on the latest version, at time of writing it is psqlodbc_08_04_0100 but any of the latest version will do fine. Then choose a mirror to download it from, extract the files and run the installation. Its a small download and very easy to install, just choose the default options and choose next until it finishes.

Ill fix the links also, i copied it from 2+2 but it seems to have put the underline tags in the url

dvdfan

Zab wrote: »

I was considering making the report side of this (for my own use) a few years ago. I didn't get the idea myself, I found it knocking around a couple of forums.

Personally, I have zero interest in the automatic lockout side of things, but the report would be interesting. I'll assume it's easy to use the application just for its reporting function. However, I play over multiple sites that report times in different zones. HM has yet to implement a conversion matrix for this, and without such a matrix the results are going to be skewed. Have you considered putting one directly into your software?

Yeah the multi timezones will causes some issues if you play across some sites, im pretty sure on stars and full tilt you can alter your timezone now however since we take our info from the database and not the hand histories but we could look into this.

dvdfan

Having looked into it we should be able to configure multi timezone support although not straight away in the beta version but it shouldnt be too hard to implement.

For anyone getting any errors when trying to connect please see this:

Did you checked was psqlODBC installed, if so can you go to Control Panel > Add Remove Programs (Programs and Features in Vista) and go to psqlODBC and click on the "click here for support information" link and it should tell you the version no: eg 08.04.100 (for vista users just click on psqlODBC and the properties will be shown in the box below at the bottom of the programs and features window)

Can you tell me which version you have so i can verify that this version isnt compatible and then remove that version by clicking on remove/uninstall and go here:

http://www.postgresql.org/ftp/odbc/versions/msi/

And download the latest version 08.04.100 then reboot and retry and let me know if it worked. Ive tested this on XP with 08.04.100 and with Vista with 08.03.400 so if you confirm older versions dont work i can update to tell people to install the newest version or investigate further to see whats the oldest compatible version. This is usually installed with .net framework 2.0 so you may have an older version depending on how long ago that was

Zab

dvdfan wrote: »

Having looked into it we should be able to configure multi timezone support although not straight away in the beta version but it shouldnt be too hard to implement.

Good stuff. I will say that this "should" be in HM in the first place and I consider it something of a failure that it isn't.

dvdfan

Yeah HM would probably do this calculation on the fly even when they do implement it (and i don't think thats anytime soon) and they most likely wont change the hand history so either way well need to have our own multi timezone support, shouldn't be too difficult, just a matter of adding a offset for each site you add via our software settings.

Zab

I agree. I meant that the conversion details should be stored in the DB by HM, and if they had been it's likely that you would have used them in the first place.