Isaac Haxton: 'Weird Social Norm' In Poker To Give Less Leeway To Tanking When Not Facing BetPoker Pro Discusses The Speed Of Play |
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It wouldn’t be the World Series of Poker without some chatter in the halls of the Rio Convention Center about how long is acceptable to think about your decisions at the poker table.
The answer to that question varies by who you ask, and obviously depends entirely on the nature of the decision. For high-stakes poker pro Isaac Haxton, there’s a contradiction to the annual tanking debate that is standing out to him this summer.
Haxton, who has won nearly $20 million lifetime in live tournaments alone, thinks it’s strange that in some routine spots it’s socially acceptable to take your time before acting, while in others it’s almost taboo. “Why is tanking facing a bet and then calling or folding given so much more leeway than tanking before betting or raising?” he tweeted late last month.
Card Player had a chance to talk to Haxton before the restart of the $50,000 buy-in no-limit hold’em high roller on Saturday. He said that tanking when first to act should be more acceptable.
“I think it’s kind of a weird social norm I guess, that people don’t mind that much if you are facing a river bet and you’re like, head in your hands, really frustrated, and think for five minutes trying to decide whether to call or fold,” Haxton said. “But if you are first to act on the river, and you need to think through a better check spot, and you tank awhile, people get a lot more frustrated by that.”
According to Haxton, the implementation of shot clocks in some of the world’s most expensive tournaments has helped to remove the discrepancy.
“Shot clocks are a really elegant solution to the problem,” he said. “If you play with a shot clock, you have a fixed amount of time and that’s that. Anytime you aren’t playing with a shot clock, and that includes cash games, it’s just really difficult to have any sort of rule or policy about what is a reasonable amount of time to take.”
“If you look at shot clock tournaments at the highest level, I think a lot of the best players are burning their time extensions for better check decisions, rather than call or fold decisions,” he continued. “I think those decisions are harder on average. It’s kind of weird to me that in cash games or lower buy-in tournaments, people have a lot more patience for tanking when facing a bet, rather than the other way around.”
It’s common for poker players to assume someone is just acting if they are tanking in a spot that doesn’t appear to make a lot of sense to. However, Haxton thinks that if you are playing correct strategically, sometimes your opponents will inevitably think you are Hollywooding.
“If I’m tanking 90 seconds before I shove the river, two-thirds of the time I have a good hand and I am just Hollywooding, or I’m thinking about other bet sizes, potentially,” he said. “But you really have no choice but to do that, because when you are deciding whether or not to bluff, it’s a difficult decision and you have to take the same amount of time either way.”
Timing tells are real, and sometimes taking those extra seconds involves an effort to be consistent. But Haxton knows that poker can’t flourish without everyone having a good time at the table, and that includes being dealt hands to play at a reasonable pace.
“Obviously, if I am playing a cash game, I would play better if I took three minutes on every decision,” he said. “But there’s no reason anyone should let me do that. If everyone else did that it would ruin the game. So, what’s reasonable? Can I have 30 second on every decision? Even that is probably too slow. Can I have 10 seconds on relatively straightforward decisions going up to 30 on harder ones? That seems to be roughly the norm but maybe slower than a lot of people play. So you do have to have this soft social norm about how long you are going to tolerate someone thinking before yelling at them. There doesn’t seem to be a better solution.”
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