Is it worth paying for more time in a hand?
Is the new GGPoker feature where you can pay for more time to make a decision worth the cost?
One of the strangest innovations in online poker is the Club WPT Gold and GGPoker feature of charging you a big blind in exchange for more time to make a decision.
At GGPoker you only get an additional 10 seconds for your decision (you can only buy one card per hand).
Crucially, GGPoker does not take the money, it is spread out between the other players at the table (but not the player who purchased it).
The feature is said to be a result of player feedback that the games were too slow because of multi-tabling regulars. At the time of writing the negative feedback has come from grinders who were getting timed out on their tables a lot. You have to select your time cards to use, rather than have them come into play automatically.
Is it a good idea?
Practically I think it would just be better to give people less time, rather than add this extra complicating factor.
If you have ever spent any time looking at solvers, the really tricky decisions tend to be very close in terms of EV. Often they are close to breakeven plays anyway, meaning going one way or another is fine.
Considering a good winrate in cash games is 4BB/100, spending 1BB for what might be a breakeven decision seems like a huge unnecessary cost. It may make a breakeven decision a losing one.
Task switching is not worth it
The extra 10 seconds is really not worth it. There is a concept called Attention Residue which refers to the fact that switching between two tasks is mentally exhausting. This is why social media can be such a productivity killer.
With the new time bank feature, you have to choose to use both your time cards and when to pay for the extra time, as the clock is ticking. When you consider the mental bandwidth that gets used in simply deciding to use your time banks, I can't imagine those extra 10 seconds are helpful at all.
I'm a big fan of anything that speeds up the game, but I can't see how anyone will get any value out of this feature. If you want faster games, just give people less time to act.
Do you like the sound of this feature? Let us know in the comments:
