The majority of poker decisions take less than 5 seconds for multi-tabling regs, most less than 2. 30 seconds is stupid long.

As you play more and more and more and more and move up stakes, you'll find that these decisions will come much quicker and naturally to you as hand reading improves and you get more experience. You should, in most cases, have a plan for each hand you play and what to do on each street and for each street of betting, be able to narrow down the villain's hand ranges so, in the case that you are faced with an all-in bet on the river, you should be able to make a decision on whether or not a call is +EV or not. Even if you aren't good at math, you *should* start to understand basic poker math such as bet sizing, basic pot odds, 1/4 2/3 1/3 1/2 PSB etc. as you put more volume in.

Or you'll go busto, I guess.

Don't try to worry about it too much at the lowest, lowest level and just study, post hand histories, watch videos, read, etc. You'll pick it up.

If you want to make a correct decision in coherence with EV, you're going to have to take the equity to you have against every single hand he can have, add the chances of him having that hand, then take the average equity according to the pot odds. It might sound complicated, but play a couple of thousand hands and you'll get the hand of the aproximate EV of your move.

lol, no, it really isnt.

ok. so i'm guessing from all this that in order to make reasonable and fast EV calculations it would be beneficial to be able to make quite accurate hand range assumptions. I know somewhere in here this would have a lot of info, does anyone know of any good threads on this?

Well it's on par, maybe, to thought processes and putting villain on a range of hands. But if you don't know where your hand stands in his range, then it's a guessing game of what action you next take

Yes, it's a guessing game. Educated guesses.

Either that, or precise calculation.

Personally, I think my way is more accurate

HEY GAMBLER"S FALLACY

I get what OP is trying to say. Of course EV is THE most important thing in poker, but you don't need to make exact precise equity calcs in every hand you play. Do this away from the table often, work with poker stove...look at HHs and work on ranges and do equity calcs often away from the table and you will start to be able to ballpark it in game and get a pretty good idea of how +EV certain plays are. The more you work on this away from the table, the quicker and more accurate you will become and you can use memory and intuition to make better decisions a lot faster. I'm no math wiz, but I work on this constantly and it works very well. Don't dismiss EV, embrace it but don't expect to be able to perfectly come up with exact percentages in 5 seconds while you are 12 tabling. Hope this helped.

There is a common misconception that you need to know your exact EV in every play you make. To be honest you don't need to even roughly know the EV of the play you are making, what you do need to do is work out where the EV of the different courses of action stand relative to each other. For example, if EV (raising) > EV (folding) > EV (calling) then I can say that raising is the correct option even though I have no idea what the exact EV (raising) is. Do I try to figure out which play would be the most profitible in the heat of battle (ie the highest EV)? Yes of course I do. What other means do you have to determine which is the correct play to make?

If this is your reasoning then you are not a natural and have a lot of work to do on your game.