Fresh off a $550,000 score for taking down the High Roller Event at the EPT Battle of Malta, Mike timex McDonald (pictured) gave his thoughts, along with some unique suggestions, on how to combat stalling on the money bubble in tournaments.

Only 26 years old, McDonald knows a thing or two about live tournaments. The Canadian pro boasts $12.5 million in live career cashes, $4 million of which he racked up in the first three months of 2014. Apart from crushing at the poker tables, McDonald is also known for his infamous stare-down, a tactic that some find unnerving, and others annoying.

That’s what makes his thoughts on stalling all the more surprising. As it turns out, he’s a big proponent of speeding up the game as much as possible.

“If you get into a peculiar situation next to the money bubble, you have to decide between doing something that’s ethically questionable and setting money on fire,” McDonald told PokerListings. “As time goes on and poker gets tougher, more and more people go for the ethically questionable thing.”

McDonald believes the problem lies in the payout structure of live tournaments and proposes a couple of radical changes to speed up the game. “One thing that could be done is to give only an estimate of the payouts, but not tell the players how much they actually get.” While it’s unclear how many poker players would agree to play in a tournament where the payouts were hidden, the suggestion is interesting nonetheless.

For games involving mostly pros and experienced players, he floats the idea of making the min-cash less than the buy-in amount. “I don’t think you need the min-cash to guarantee that you’re making a profit,” he said. “You could easily start with paying out 40% of the buy-in and then maybe 70% of the buy-in.”

The idea of a smaller min-cash is similar to Daniel Negreanu‘s suggestion for making tournament payouts flatter, meaning paying more places but award less cash to each player.

Timex also proposes the idea of hiding the pay jumps from players. “I suggest that instead of having a pay jump, say, every 10 hands, you could randomly select a number between one and 10 after each jump to determine how many busted players would be in the next payout level,” he said.

McDonald says that he is a big fan of implementing a shot clock as well. While he refers to himself as slow player, McDonald believes that speedier action would be to his benefit, as he would play more hands per hour on average.

Clocking someone just isn’t aggressive enough,” he said. “Today, we had a situation in the Main Event when a player had a decision he could have taken in one second. I called the clock on him after 10 seconds, but the staff said they can’t clock him before two minutes.”

To combat such scenarios, McDonald suggests making players pay for the privilege of taking their time in making decisions. “Let’s say you keep the small denomination chips in play and for every five seconds you need, you have to pay a quarter of an ante or something like that,” he said.

While it’s an interesting idea, implementing it during live tournaments would be something of a challenge. McDonald believes that such a system could work online, however. “Just make every single person pay and benefit fast players,” he continued. “I’m sure something along those lines would work.”

Want the latest poker headlines and interviews? Follow PocketFives on Twitterand Like PocketFives on Facebook.