Poker Articles

When we're playing cards, live or online, it's our job as poker players to manage the information we give out. We want to maximize the information we take in, and minimize what we give off. We try not to fall into predictable patterns with our betting, or let our words or demeanor give away hints at our hand. But one of the vital pieces of information in an online poker game is often forgotten. I'm talking about timing.

Now, when I say timing, I don't mean knowing the right times to shift your game up a gear, or knowing at which stage of the tournament to take a flip or not. Those are certainly important, of course, but I'm talking about timing in the literal sense.

There aren't many tells available online. We can't see our opponents nervous habits, their ticks and twitches, their concealed frowns and grins. We base our decisions on repeated actions like betting patterns relating to situations, like how somone usually plays a certain street or certain type of hand. However, there's another free piece of information concealed in those actions - the speed at which an opponent bets.

While good players usually remember to vary their betting patterns, they rarely pay attention to the speed with which they act. This can give you a useful advantage. For example,I find that many looser players will usually insta-bet on a continuation bet or outright bluff if they're up against a tight player. If they had a hand, they'd probably take a second or two to think about it. On the other hand, a good player with a  made hand will often get excited and come out firing off instant bets each street.

As always, you have to use the showdowns you've seen to figure out which betting speed corresponds to which type of hand. But once you do, it's a valuable bit of information that's available to you every hand and which most opponents never think to change.

Here's another, more commonly-known way to utilize bet speed. Let's say you're in the SB, with a weak/tight player in the BB. You limp, and he instachecks - literally, you can tell he marked the check/fold box before you even acted. If the flop comes high, bet out. You'll usually take the pot away. He could have waited a few seconds to see what you did, but he gave away the strength of his hand early out of laziness and essentially told you that pot was yours. Is this 100% accurate? Of course not. But it's another useful bit of information in your arsenal, and as a tell, it's accurate more often than not.

How about a situation where mismanaging your bet speed can lose you a hand? Here's one from a few days ago. I was playing a SNG, and I limped with 99 on the button (for reasons specific to that game), the SB folded, and the BB checked. He was pretty loose, but once you reraised him, he was prone to laying down hands that he bet big with. The flop came Q34 and he led out for the size of the pot, which was decent sized since the blinds were big. I looked through the hand histories, and upon spotting his pattern of betting hard with marginal hands and then folding to raises, and considering that getting him to laydown his hand would pretty much lock up second place for me, I moved in over the top. He though for a long time and called with Q5. Now, had I quickly pushed in there, he probably would have folded that hand - we'll never know. But since I took 30 seconds to look through hand histories, it gave off the impression that I didn't have the Q and didn't know what to do. Mismanaging my bet speed busted me from that game. If I'd had KK there, though, that extra 30 seconds would've earned me a double-up.

Here's another way to use bet speed to your advantage: make sure to ham it up on your huge hands. IF you have a big made hand, don't be lazy: act. Pretend. If you have a hand that's a relative lock, like a flopped boat or flush, realize that getting all excited and acting too quickly can easily scare an opponent off. Literally, the speed at which you bet your big hands could easily mean the difference between a bubble and a win. You need to get value for your huge made hands at any cost. So let 15 or 20 seconds run, make it look like you're thinking, especially if it's after they bet at you.

How do you defend against giving off information with your bet speed? Well, one good excercise is to practice waiting a set amount of time before you act on any hand. Say, 10 or 15 seconds. Set up your phone stopwatch to time out a certain number of seconds, and get used to always waiting that long to act. It certainly can't hurt, in the long run, to cut out one source of information that you're giving your opponent. This is a technique that Andy Beal used against the pros in his heads-up matches.

In online poker, which is devoid of the physical tells available in live poker, every bit of information is magnified in value. When I first started, I was super-conscientious about my bet speed. After a few thousand games, I started to slack, as I didn't think anyone would notice. When I whipped myself back into shape, and reminded myself that it was stupid not to do EVERYTHING in my power to win, I actually realized how much value I was losing when I got lazy with my bet speed. Don't leave chips on the table. Make sure time is on your side.