They are part of the game at this current time. They are also like a cancer which must be dealt with in the harshest possible way. They are driving away casual players and making the game unenjoyable for everyone involved. I am not the only one with this view if you look through this thread.

Granted. You are also not the only one without this view.

Maybe there should be a big zap gun that zaps the cancerous stallers when they start stalling. That would get rid of them and their money would be, quite literaly, dead.

Current WSOP changes look like a reasonable improvement. The most egregious offenders causing the most angst are targeted.

The rules' inability to be equitably enforced seems like another aspect of variance in poker. Isn't it just like table makeup where at a given moment you are seated with a random, inequitable ratio of fish, pros, and tankers? This issue and reaction is an example of perfection being the enemy of good imo.

Timex, interesting idea but I think it would add a layer of complexity and stress to the game that would not be fun for recreational players (specifically people with limited experience). There is a lot of information to process in a poker game and it can be tough for an untrained brain to keep up without feeling overwhelmed as is.

EV of each:

1. slowrolling - depending on the stakes, a few bucks?
2. Overly precise raise sizes - first of all it happens pretty often in tournaments anyway, but again, ev is absurdly small, probably a few cents.
3. Excessive tanking - bubble of the main event, this could be worth as much as 5k in ev
4. Tipping dealers - only thing similar in ev, over the year pros could save thousands, but think about tipping in other areas. How often do you go to a restaurant you'll never go to again? How often do you tip there? No social pressure there, so why do you do it? The difference is "if people didn't tip, this person would literally not be able to afford to live" versus "if people tank, other people will have a slightly less enjoyable time". There's a pretty huge moral difference here
5. Berating fish - still happens way too often, and actually -ev

So again, you're using examples that cost pennies or dollars to justify using social pressure to get people to sacrifice thousands in ev. As someone who sold action to the main and was short going into the morning the bubble was going to break, I asked some friends and they pretty much agreed that it would actually be immoral not to tank, because I had an obligation to my investors to maximize my ev. Again we're not talking a few dollars, we're talking about the difference between having 15bb and 5bb when the bubble bursts. The ev of that in a 10k is easily 5k+.

The answer is to make and enforce rules that make there be no incentive to tank. This social pressure nonsense is just that, nonsense.

Not sure if it has been mentioned but why not just stop the clock when you get to 5 from the money (might be a different number depending on size of field) combined with a shot clock of 15 pre and 30 post seems to be the sensible way with hand for hand.

Zac,

I see your point but think that view depends on how you structure your perspective...

I would argue people invest in you, a poker player, based on your overall EV. Once in the tournament you have a personal responsibility to play to your ability level. This includes all of your good and bad plays, as well as if you are someone who chooses to make a sacrifice in morality to improve EV in various situations. The whole, someone invested in me and so I should choose a play the investor themselves would choose is flawed because it doesn't hold true in other situations. You're selectively using it as a defense for a non strategy related betting action that negatively impacts your fellow competitors and the game as a whole.

Making that morality sacrifice is a personal choice. I can imagine someone having legitimate personal reasons for doing so. It should not be the norm.

I mean I'm not gonna hide behind that, I would have done the same thing either way. Even though I hate tanking in general, I'm not gonna sacrifice thousands in ev by not doing it myself. They just need to make and enforce a rule, which it seems the wsop has already done this year.

Can stalling induce tilt? I play mostly cash and I have seen other players get frustrated by slow-acting players, so much so that even though I try not to take too much time, I am happy to let slow players do so because they often cause other players to become impatient and play too high of a percentage of hands to compensate for the fewer hands per hour.

Terrence, I don't think your 6 minute per hand logic (with a 20 second shot clock) makes realistic sense. Who has the most incentive to stall? The players with the smallest stacks. Who has incentive not to stall? Players with "healthy" stacks so they can steal from the small stacks. Unless the table consist of all small stacks, not everyone has an incentive to stall.

Those players that do raise and play pots aren't the small stacked players and they have no great incentive to stall. So post flop stalling won't happen as much as preflop stalling......

Am I misunderstanding something?

Again short term thinking
It's terrible long term and in the last year or so I've taken great joy in calling the clock on habitual tankers.speeds the game along and pisses off the tankers.win win.

Sounds like you are part of the problem.

I do not play live tournaments but I am sure at some point I would love to play some major ones. However hearing all the stories of tanking and stalling puts me off big time. Stalling is just so toxic to the game.

if they started paying at 50% of field (something low like 10% of buy-in) and had a pay jump every 5% of field until buy-in back near 15% of field, there would not be any zero to 2 times buy-in jumps - lowering stalling...

So is cash game bumhunters only playing in soft games and snap moving to the left of a whale when a seat comes available. High and mighty cash regs belittle tournament players but more scummy behaviour goes on in cash games. I mean stalling on the bubble vs praying on whales which is worse?

Players stalling on the bubble doesn't even make top 10 list of annoying things you'll have to deal with playing a live tournament. Seating is cramped, people smell, people give the dealers ****, they hollywood, they're ****ty people, etc. Online is just fundamentally superior because of the ability to structurally address issues like this. All this talk of timebanks for live events ignores how cumbersome it would be to implement. I want to see a tournament director come in here and tell you all the reasons this wouldn't work.

nice post, OP. sort of grunching, but why not go to chess like clocks where you get a certain amt for each level and once it's gone, you have 5? (3?) seconds to act every time.

that's obv for online. for live, shame from players and very aggressive floors who will liberally use penalties for repeat offenders should solve the problem.

The bubble is steep enough that probably only the table's chip leader (maybe top 2 chip leaders) benefits from playing more hands and everyone else is ev-correct to stall. Any mid-sized or non-big stack would find it in their best interests to stall.

I don't see how stopping the tournament clock is supposed to be a *good* thing as people are suggesting. The whole point of the bubble is that the whole field is under pressure - removing time pressure doesn't help matters, it makes it worse. The clock should always continue to run during hand for hand play. This pressure is also beneficial to apply to non-short-stacked players, because any player can call clock on any other in a tournament (not just at the same table), it provides an incentive for clock to be promptly called on any stalling player.

This is an issue that players can resolve themselves right now under existing rules. Players often just seem afraid to use the tools that are explicitly offered them by the rules, and want to achieve a result without taking responsibility for the tournament in which they wish to achieve a result.

That's not to say that there isn't a problem. But a lot of the solutions proposed come with much more significant problems - most notably, expanding payout structures to the max. Someone here suggested paying 50%! That must have been a joke, but flattening and expanding payouts beyond about 12.5% or maybe 15% will kill tournament poker WAY before stalling does.

How would paying out a slightly higher % of the field "kill tournament poker" if the payouts are only a small fraction of the buy-in?

Let's say instead of paying 15% of the field, you pay 20%. But those additional 5% of places are paid an average of 0.5 buy-in. This would only reduce the prize pool for everyone else by 2.5%, not nearly enough to be noticed by a typical player.

This thread is about stalling in tournaments.but I said in this thread I hate how poker players sabotage their own games and that includes cash game players.

I played 3 WSOP tournaments for a total of 6 days and while stalling was an issue it was dealt with swiftly and harshly. People were much quicker than in the past to call the clock and when the floor came over he didn't even bother to ask what the situation was, just immediately started a 30-second countdown. Would-be stallers were harrassed. I myself was the shortest stack on the bubble in one tournament and desperately wanted to cash as I had overstayed my spousal agreement by two days already. All I could do differently was wait until it was my turn to look at my cards. (Note: I never stall with rags.) In my opinion the situation has been largely solved.

I'm a staller. IDGAF. I feed off table resentment too. I'm never going to see half the fools again anway. I could care less. If I can improve my EV legally I'm in. Etiquette in this spot? Me thinks not.

As far as all the other examples of play the OP mentioned- yes.

Is that how you view everything? Just accepting it as "part of life" no matter how bad it is?

Stalling on the bubble is clearly scummy and needs to be dealt with in harshest way possible. Along with all the other cancers in poker such as seating scripters, bots, illegal software. The list goes on.

No it's not clearly scummy, there is zero evidence for this so give it up. The other things you mention clearly are scummy. But they have next to less than zero effect on live poker so they are completely irrelevant to what we are on about.

The "part of life" bit - no that's not how I view everything. Games should evolve, by all means find a way to speed the game up near the bubble. But please don't call stalling scummy because that's just ridiculous.

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