time limit and tough decisions online

[MrFixxiT]

Some decisions in poker really need some thought, especially for the not (yet) so experienced players.

In online play the time limit for a decision is pretty low, like 20 seconds. Most of the time this is enough, but especially late (bubble time) in tournaments and SnG's it isn't.

How do you guys cope with that? Or will the experience outweigh the short decision time in the long run?

I, myself, are known to be a long thinker even at standard board games; leaving it to other's to say if it helps me or not though! But for me it's pretty hard to be quick, even at easier decisions.

[doubleup]

Most of the time 20 seconds is more than enough time to make a decision. In a tourny or SNG on PS, you get 60 seconds, I believe. Cash games you receive 20 seconds. I've only had a few times where I had to either call or fold without being able to think the entire hand through. In these cases you just gotta trust your gut.

[MrFixxiT]

Ok, just what I thought. For the beginning unexperienced player this means more gut moves and more bad moves because of that.

But as soon as you get a little experience you know what to think of and thus need less time and the times your gut needs to speak, it's better at saying the right thing.

At Everest though, I think it's 20 seconds in SnG's. And that's for the normal (no speed, no turbo) games. And I just found out that 20 seconds is more than enough most of the time indeed..

[doubleup]

And just a warning..not sure how it works on other sites, but on PS you don't get 60 seconds each separate hand..you start off with 60 and if you use 20 seconds of that time for 1 hand, you have 40 seconds remaining for the rest of the tourny..which sucks.

My internet connection went out during the ITH tourny and I got it back with just 1 second left. Throughout the rest of the tourny I only had 1 sec spare...so I had to go through the rest of the tourny makin quick decisions. I realized I only had 1 second left when I was tryin to milk a set of flopped aces.....not a good time to find out!

[MrFixxiT]

That's a strange way of dealing with it indeed. I would be ok with it if you get 20 seconds normally, but you can think for 60 seconds once in a tournament and then 40 seconds once more, but this resulting in only 1 second left for every move? That way you really have to play by the auto-buttons.

At Everest it's a fixed 20 second limit as I see it and you get 5 seconds every time to show or muck your hands, the latter of which is pretty annoying, because a lot of times you have to wait 5 seconds for another player to muck his hand. I use the auto muck; I could always decide in a hand that the will be a possible hand show and turn it off.
It is nice though that you can sperately turn on the auto muck for winning and losing hands.

[Bugsbunny]

[MrFixxiT]

Ok, misunderstood, but hoped it was something like that.

I haven't found something like that at Everest yet though.

[matrix]

Thanks for your discussion

[Soultwister]

It seems at higher limits the time bank gives you more time, and in cash games it replenishes based on time/amount of hands played.

At the lower limits the time bank stays quite small, but it's not that odd for me to fold in a decision I expect to be very marginal either way when I have a small timebank left, just to save those precious seconds for a later decision.

[Willem]

The more you play, the faster you can make decisions. I am now learning some other games and is occurs frequently that I have to think for 10 seconds or so. But when I play my main game (LHE), my average response time is around 1-2 seconds.