Custom field to hide title

I know this has been asked before, and I ‘ve found some helpful information. I created a custom field called ‘hide_title’, and this code in my template file:

<?php if (get_post_meta($post->ID, "hide_title", true))
{ ?>
  <h1 class="postitle">
      <?php the_title(); ?>
  </h1>
<?php }
?>

so if I set the ‘hide_title’ field to ‘true’, it should ignore the code that displays the title, right? But it doesn’t work, the title always shows. What am I missing? please help!