Excessive tanking is bad for the game. It makes poker less fun which will turn recreational players off, which will reduce revenue for the casino as well as professionals. In addition, it reduces hands per hour, which reduces win rates.

The player who excessively tanks gains three advantages:
1. More time to think through each spot
2. Balance of timing tells
3. Tilting opponents (You could argue that being able to sit still and stare at a frozen person without losing your mind is a skill, but I think poker is better if i does not index heavily on this skill)


Shot clocks mitigate this a bit - they cap tanking at 30 seconds in each spot, which cuts down on gigantic, multi-minute tanks, and help a lot during the bubble where players used to sometimes fake tank egregiously.

However they are not able to disincentivize players from taking 30 seconds on every single decision, including spots like folding 72o utg or checking your bb after defending against a UTG open and seeing the board come AK9 rainbow. Taking more than 30 seconds is taxed (with a time bank chip) but there is no difference between 1 second and 30.

Like pollution, it is a negative externality issue. In a game with pros and recs, as a group the pros should not tank, but individually each pro is incentivized to tank frequently. Collectively, we currently expect everyone to act as expediently as possible for the good of the community and name and shame those that do not, which isn't a great solution. It is always better to make the rules incentivize the outcomes that you desire rather than trying to convince people not to do things which are legal (or grey) within the rules.


A better solution would be something like a chess clock, where each player has a personal time bank that starts after 5 seconds in every action, or that starts immediately on action but adds a couple seconds every time. This would tax marginal seconds more evenly. However, this seems technologically difficult to implement in a live poker setting.


So, here is my proposal (obviously all the the parameters are tweakable):

1. You have a buzzer that has a 1/60 chance of going off every minute. So on average it goes off every hour or so, but it might go off 3 times in 10 minutes or it might not go off for three hours.

2. When the buzzer sounds, the dealer identifies the player who the action is currently on, and the time on the shot clock.

3. The hand plays out normally

4. The next hand, the player who got buzzed has to pay a penalty. If there were fewer than 5 seconds used on the shot clock (i.e. the buzzer sounded right after the action got to them), then there is no penalty. If they had used 5-10 seconds, the penalty is 1bb. 10-15 seconds, 2bbs. 15-20, 3bbs. 20-25, 4bbs. 25-50, 5bbs.

The player must either blind straddle the penalty amount or add it to the antes as a bomb pot (not like, they have a choice, I just mean that I don't know which of these is a more fun option to use)

A player cannot be penalized more than half of their stack. So if the previous hand ends and they have 6bbs and they incurred a 5bb penalty, then in this case the penalty would be reduced to 3. (Less of an issue w the straddle penalty rather than the bomb pot penalty)

Maybe you could also sacrifice 1 time chip to save 1bb too.



I believe this accomplishes several things:

1. Excessive tanking is now taxed linearly - the longer you take in general, the more likely you are to be penalized AND ALSO the higher the expected value of your penalty is likely to be. There is an element of randomness to the penalty, but that is true of literally everything else that happens in a poker tournament.

2. It will create more interesting situations around blind straddles and bomb pots which will create hands that move away from GTO solutions, which (at least to me) will make the games more fun

3. To a lesser degree, it will also create more interesting situations during the buzzed hand itself. Once they've been buzzed, a player knows they must pay a penalty next hand - does that change their behavior in the current hand?

4. Timing tells become a more strategic part of the game. "Fake tanks" are now more costly and will therefore happen strictly much less frequently, but they won't go to zero. When somebody really does tank it's much more likely to be a real tank, which is informative, so you still have to balance those somewhat, which is now a strategically interesting thing rather than just a thing that's free for you but costly for the game. And for shaun deeb, the pleasure of slow rolling people will go up tenfold.



I haven't really thought this through that much, but on the surface it seems feasible to implement, logically aligned with what the goals, should (at least to me) make games much more fun and also would make the community less toxic as it would give us one fewer thing to get pissed at each other about

so you have a random chance of being penalized for taking 10 seconds?

That sounds like a horrible idea

As far as I'm aware TD's already have full discretion to penalize this behaviour but they don't. It's the TD's that need to be lobbied.

While tanking in televised events ruins the watchablity, in a way it’s actually more annoying in smaller stakes tournaments because the levels are shorter. With 30 minute levels, super frustrating when people tank for 5.

We just need to normalize time chips in every tournament, the additional complexity is worth speeding up the game.

Finally, I’ve seen people defend tanking because poker is complex and high level play requires thought. Nobody denies that, in fact the whole problem is there is a big incentive to tank. But it’s a tragedy of the commons when it slows down the game for the other players and spectactors.

We have the solution. BB ante went from odd reformat to gold standard. Time chips should go the same way and he standard in every tournament at all stakes.

don't disagree with the motivation, but hard to imagine any remedy (including your random buzzer shot clock) that's feasible to implement across poker rooms that isn't a net negative in terms of alienating recs with a new scheme of complicated time rules

Why is it different than randomly being penalized when your table is broken after you just paid the blinds, then getting moved to a new table utg? Or a cash game, with time pots where one player pays everyone's time out of convenience? Why should I have to have my hands per hour cut in half because I randomly drew Vogelsang's table?

It's poker dude, in any one hand or tournament there are literally a million different ways to get lucky or unlucky. But in the long run the good players will win and the bad players will lose.

With this run, in the serial tankers will pay a tax to the players who act quickly, which in turn will help shape behavior and make the games more enjoyable.

With current habits, sure I might get penalized here and there, but Jordan Cristos is gonna get penalized five times as often as me in the long run.

That's better than nothing, but it creates rampant opportunity for uneven enforcement and favoritism, and it also creates an unpleasant environment where players are forced to acrimoniously narc on tankers, and creates hostility where none is necessary.

Like the shot clock or the bb ante, I imagine this would get rolled out in HRs first, and adoption would slowly spread over years

Seems unrealistic. Now the other idea with each player having their own personal time bank, let’s say 5 minutes total and after 10 seconds for every decision it Starts to eat into that 5 minutes, that seems more plausible

Preflop you get 3 seconds to act. Post flop you get 30 seconds. In higher buy ins 100k plus maybe they can be allowed some time bank chips.

How about just removing the penalized BB(s) from play (i.e. no blind straddle or bomb pot)?

this is maybe the dumbest post ive seen in a long time, put down the crack pipe

this is why 2plus2 is so ****ing dead.

Guy gives out some solutions for difficult problem and people shitpost all over it.

That's Galen Hall I believe who started this thread, really no need for this kind of comment.

Hey I’m all for people trying to address the tanking problem, and I applaud the concern we all share, but sorry the ideas here for a remedy are just re-tarded lol.

While the shot clock is certainly not perfect it has a huge benefit over most other approaches except for the chess clock: You can explain it in one sentence.

We need to get rid of tanking without adding a couple of layers of complexity to the game.

I think there are ways to improve the shot clock without making it overly complicated but that's obviously nothing that could be implemented at hundreds of tables at the WSOP without signifiant financial investment.

Chess clock, 120 seconds. Resets every dealer down.

Everyone gets a 30 second bonus time chip when they start and plus one every two hours at the table.

Your hand is mucked if you don’t have a chip 10 seconds after the buzzer sounds.

Your buzzer resets to 30 seconds once after your hand where buzzer goes off.

After your second buzzer with the same dealer you have to wait for a dealer change to get dealt in with a new time clock.

All I know is that 99% of the players who play tournaments will never have to worry about playing with Vogelsong(which is a great thing)as he only plays the highest of buyins. I think if he was 1 of those mid-stakes tournament grinders who traveled the wsop circuit or wpt or MSPT, he'd have probably been in a few fights by now.

Stop watching live streams & wait for the produced version to be finished. I know that kills PokerGo's business model but *shoulder shrugs* i dont care. It's a **** product anyways.

I could give two craps about a person taking 10 minutes per decision live. It's their life. If you wanna YOLO your life sitting around staring at degens, who am I to stop them?

I see plenty of absurd tanking in low stakes tournaments . And again it’s worse with levels. Yeah you can call clock but then you gotta decide how much time has been reasonable, wait for floor.

I don’t see time chips being as chasing off recs like others suggest. On the contrary I think it’s more fun and thus better if the game moves faster, live poker is slow enough without tanking.

It’s also analogous to shot clocks in basketball or managing timeouts in NFL which most recs can appreciate .

“You get 30 seconds to make a decision and 10 +30 seconds time chips per day.”
It’s simple for anyone to understand and I think most people will be happy. It’s pros who are more likely to be tankers anyway.

Finally, time chips are simple but also add some extra strategy around their use, both the management of saving them and how they can be perceived for tells.

There’s so much more upside for time chips than downsides. We don’t need to overthink it. Shot clock with time chips is simple and effective.

I think time chips and separating pre-post flop by colors or size/shape is best.


10 secs pre

30 secs post


with time extensions for both and maybe some sort of incentive for not using any/many of each time chips.

People need to call the clock more in all forms of poker.

I wish poker rooms had tablet tanking tables. If you want to sit there on your tablet watching netflix and tanking every hand then great- all of your table mates will do the same.

Your point about chess clock solves it all. Player acts, either check, fold, call(chips put in middle) or raise (chips put in middle), then tap ipad and it's on to next player. start with 2 minute clock and add +5 after every decision. Clock resets at every break. Keeps a reasonable pace and no one ever builds an excessive bank towards bubble tanking situations.

Chess clock has some minor advantages over simple shot clock + time chip extension, but it's not worth the cost and complexity of an iPad or other hardware. Requiring an iPad at a table adds a big expense especially for big tournament, and there is also risk that the software has bugs. Time chips are low tech, cheap, simple, and require no additional hardware or software.

If we are going to limit tanking across poker, it's ideal if there' one standard most tournaments stick to. That way people are more used to it and not as confused. Not every tournament is going to want all these extra iPads or more software to manage. Casinos already handle chips, thus can handle time chips.

The hole card camera revolutionized the game. I think you have to re-imagine the poker table and combine everything discussed here into the table itself. No time bank chips, no chess clocks, nothing extra for the dealer to do. It has to be a "Single pane of glass solution" where the dealer, the eye in the sky, the player, and other players can see exactly where the action is and how much time is left in the users time bank.

Maybe one day I'll build a proof of concept and post it on 2p2. It would be much easier to show, than tell.

But quite honestly, if some enterprising engineer at PokerAtlas or bravo is reading this thread, please steal my idea and incorporate it into your existing software suite. You are already selling software and embedded poker table technology to poker rooms all across america, this would be an amazing upgrade.

I don't think the computing power needed to make this happen would be very costly. I think you could achieve what I am thinking about with a Raspberry Pi

Table top technology has been around for decades.



I remember seeing this at CES back in 08

I'm not saying we need eGaming tables for tournament poker; I'm just saying, the technology required to solve this problem has existed for quite sometime, and the poker world wouldn't need more than 1% of the tech available back in 08 to solve this problem.

You could keep the traditional felt, and leather racetrack, but add just a tiny bit of technology and the problem is solved.