I never chop at 20/40 and above but if you normally do then in time collection games you absolutely should not be chopping. You're essentially playing rake free.

This makes me wonder what ideal time pot play should be. Blinds should defend very rarely. UTG/EP should be really tight. But if it gets folded to CO/BTN, successful steal% should go way up. BTN should be opening any two cards, since blinds should fold very often. It's almost like a game of chicken. Since BTN gets first move, he wins. If a blind calls without a monster, it's a spite call that costs both players money.

If people are really playing like this or close to it, opt out (pay your own time) and pick up a lot of blind money. Time pots exist to exploit unthinking players, but if most of your oppenents are sharp or nitty they're action killers and vulnerable to the hack I mentioned unless mandatory.

Actually, that 0.1BB/hand difference is big. Given that a lot of hands run close in value (don't remember which book it was had a nice graph of this), I think you're making the case for people who are saying "you should play a lot tighter". Feel-wise, I think it isn't this bad, but maybe I play too many hands in this spot. I guess it is that delta times how often it comes up. The total rake shouldn't be 10BB/100.

Let's take the 0.1, as our best current guess. Do we know which hands become unprofitable? Sure we do. It is the ones we were kind of questioning playing at all. It is already common wisdom, if the rake is high you pass on the close ones. You were thinking about raising 97s in the CO vs. maybe adding 86s or 75s. Depending on the rake, you'd nit up. Someone gets a 20/40 game going here in Colorado with $7/hand rake, you're probably not going hyper-LAG for profit.

Here's another way of thinking of the same thing.

We know that some starting hands are value hands. Hands like big pocket pairs and big aces, where we are ahead of our opponents. In those cases we are raising pre-flop to get money into the pot.

Those hands aren't hurt very much by rake. Sure, pocket aces will make a bit less money with a higher rake, but they are still going to be very profitable.

Other starting hands, however, are implied odds hands. Especially suited connectors. These hands depend on the pot size to be profitable. If too much rake is being taken out of the pot, they become unprofitable, with the weaker ones becoming unprofitable first.

What rake does is decrease your implied odds, which decreases the value of hands that depend on implied odds.

There's a similar issue in kill games. When you have the leg up or a kill, it decreases your implied odds. You win less from the pots you play, because you have to put some back in next hand. Which means that you should be tighter with respect to playing hands that depend on implied odds for their value.

This is why I tighten up with drawing hands when isolating a short stack, or when defending my blind vs a short stack, but I'll loosen up with hands that can win a showdown unimproved. For example, if a player with 3 small bets opens on the button and it folds to me in the big blind, I'll call Q3o. I'd fold it against a fully stacked player but since he's short, the reverse implied odds are lessened.