Timing Tells Made Simple

Last week I posted a Play & Explain in my channel titled “How To Exploit Timing Tells”. 

This theme is one of my favorites in poker, so I thought it was the appropriate timing to bring this topic to the Newsletter.

In this post, instead of focusing on how you can use the timing information to exploit your opponents (you can refer to my videos for an introduction to that), here I’ll focus on the fundamental aspects of causality for this phenomenon. What exactly causes it? And why is it important to understand the causes?

I personally strongly believe that the execution of an exploit at the tables is very facilitated by a deep understanding of it’s mechanics. If you can understand, deeply and clearly, why you’re making an adjustment, you’ll be much more likely to correctly execute it, and also to remain calm and confident in the instances when it (inevitably) doesn’t work.

Of course, you could just take my word for it – either because you trust me, or because you’ve been convinced by the evidence I’ve shown – but in my opinion you’re much better off in the long run if you can devote some time to actually try and understand the fundamental causes of timing tells. Let’s do that together.

An important initial disclaimer here is that everything we’ll discuss going forward should be considered in the context of analyzing the behavior of regulars. Recreational players also exhibit timing tells, but since I don’t have actual data to backup my perceptions (like I have for regulars), I prefer to leave them aside in this post.

So let’s get straight to the point: what exactly causes timing tells to exist? 

I already gave you a spoiler at the top of the page, and said that this question has 2 different answers. In fact, there are 2 major elements of the experience of playing online poker professionaly that naturally lead to the emergence of timing tells. 

I call the first one the “focus and attention problem“. 

Picture yourself playing online poker. If you are a serious player, it’s very likely you don’t play one table at a time. If you play mostly fast format tables, you likely play 3 to 4 fast tables at the same time. If you play mostly regular tables, then we are looking at a range of 6-12 tables at the same time.

Regardless of how many tables you actually play at once, one thing is very certain – you don’t actually play all of them at the same time. That’s obviously impossible. What we do instead is to continuously alternate between the tables, picking an action one table at the time, as the decisions come up.

If it’s your time to act on tables 1, 4 and 6 simultaneously, unfortunately you can’t make and execute your decisions at the same time on all of them. You’ll instead click a button on table 4, then your eyes will be redirected to table 1, where you’ll click another button; and then finally you move your attention to table 6, where you’ll pick yet another button to click according to your strategical gameplan.

And here is where things start to get interesting.

How and why did you decide to act on Tables 4-1-6, in that order, instead of tables 6-4-1, or 1-6-4? Consciously or unconsciously, you made a judgement call about which tables should be prioritized first. Perhaps your time bank was running low on table 4, which forced you to prioritize that table, otherwise your hand would be dead. Perhaps you had KhQh on table 4, which happens to be your favorite hand, so you wanted to play that one first.

Although there might be multiple internal mental algorithms that help us determine the proper order of prioritization for our decisions, there is one algorithm that stands out the most, which will be the most determinant one in our executions, particularly for early street, repetitive decisions: the hand strength algorithm.

The hand strength algorithm is the most obvious algorithm for decision making under time pressure possible. In a context where there is a time constraint (there is a limit to how long you can take to act, where exceeding it kills your hand), the most logical algorithm is to give preference to the decisions that are worth more money. It doesn’t make sense in most circumstances to prioritize low EV hands in detriment of high EV hands. 

It’s like those TV shows (or for a more modern reference, MrBeast’s challenges) where someone has the opportunity to get everything they can fit in their kart for free in 60 seconds on a major supermarket or tech store. The most obvious strategy in such a challenge is to prioritize the highest price items first, and fill your kart with as many of those as you can. Once you run out of the highest priced items, you go after the 2nd highest priced items, and so on (I’m ignoring the volume variable of the item here, which is also relevant in those challenges).

Whether you like it or not, you and all of your (regular) opponents use the same algorithm, more often than not (although certainly not always). If on table 1 you hold AA on the button, and on table 6 you hold T8o on the HJ, your unconscious algorithm will decide that the highest EV strategy for you long term is to act on the AA hand first, and if there is nothing else in the middle, you go fold the T8o from the HJ. If you are facing a 3bet while holding KK on table 2, and then you are facing a 3bet while holding 98o on table 4 at the same time, you will choose to act on table 2 before table 4, more often than not. That’s what the algorithm will tell you to do. And guess what: that’s a good algorithm.

It makes absolute sense to do that. Folding T8o from HJ is literally worth 0 dollars to you. If you eventually time out with that hand, you are not incurring any loss whatsoever. The absolute opposite, however, happens to AA. Timing out and folding AA preflop is an incredibly terrible outcome for your winrate. AA is worth multiple big blinds per hand, which means it is worth multipe hundreds of big blinds per hundred hands. You can’t afford to timeout with AA.

It’s because of this internal, unconscious algorithm that most of the preflop timing tells exist. The RFI timing is a great example. In my Grind Simulator software (I talk about it iny my 2 videos about timing tells, links below), these are some relevant stats that demonstrate the effect:

• When not accounting for timing, my students folded 65% of the time to 3bets;

• When they RFI’ed with a timing of 1.5s or lower, they folded 58% of the time to 3bets;

• When they RFI’ed with a timing of 9s or higher, they folded 70% of the time to 3bets.

• When not accounting for timing, my students 4bet 10.5% of the time vs 3bets;

• When they RFI’ed with a timing of 1.5s or lower, they 4bet 14.1% of the time vs 3bets;

• When they RFI’ed with a timing of 9s or higher, they 4bet 8.4% of the time vs 3bets.

The numbers show how a quick timing is performed by a stronger range on average, which folds less and 4bets more against 3bets compared to the no timing range and the long timing range. The long timing on the other hand is composed by a weaker range – evidenced by the excess of folds and lower frequency of 4bets.

That being said, notice how a long timing doesn’t mean “complete garbage hand 100% of the time“. There are still 30% of hands strong enough to continue. A timing tell is not a binary phenomenon – it’s a probabilistic phenomenon. Essentially what happens is that there is a lower probability that a strong hand gets played with a long timing (although still higher than 0), and a higher probability that a weak hand gets played with a long timing (although not 100%) – that doesn’t at all mean that weak hands always play with a long timing, or that strong hands always play with a quick timing. It’s just that their distributions across all the possible timings are not equally weighted. 

The 2 graphs below illustrate what should be the probability distribution of AA for a player that is balanced with his RFI timings (figure 1) and the actual distribution for a real player (figure 2):

Figure 1 – Probability Distribution of AA with different RFI timings (balanced player)

Figure 2 – Probability Distribution of AA with different RFI timings (real player)

The sickest thing about timing tells is that it’s pretty much impossible not to have them if you are playing multiple tables at the same time. The only way to overcome this would be to employ a randomization algorithm where the next action you take to execute is picked by the randomizer, instead of being picked by the hand strength algorithm. That would be a negative EV algorithm, however, as it could sometimes lead you to timeout with a high EV hand, while you prioritize the execution of a low EV hand.

One way some people try to mitigate this problem is by tanking more with their strong hands. Note how this is very ineffective, however: if you start tanking with all of your strongest hands, now you have just changed the way you are exploitable. All of your quick timings now lack strong hands, which means you are incredibly weak when acting fast. An observant opponent would realize that sooner or later, and you’d get exploited again – it’s just that the exploit reversed.  

Summarizing: the focus and attention problem refers to the fact that our attention and focus can only be directed at one thing at the time. When we are playing online poker, however, we play multiple tables. Therefore, to be able to play multiple tables “simultaneously”, we continuously switch between them, employing a prioritization algorithm to decide which table we should focus first, and which should be addressed next. For obvious reasons, unconsciously or consciously, we prioritize high EV hands, and act on them first – which constitutes the hand strength algorithm. This algorithm is responsible for quick timings being stronger on average, and long timings being weaker on average (specifically for bet/raise decisions). This unintended consequence, however, doesn’t make the algorithm bad – it’s a logical thing to do to prioritize high EV hands when we have a time constraint that could kill our hand.

The second major element of the experience of playing poker professionaly that causes timing tells to exist is the “difficulty of decision” element. This one is very easy to understand.

Opening AA preflop from the BTN is extremely easy. You look at your hand and you immediately know what you are supposed to do. You can do it in a split second.

Deciding whether or not you want to turn 3rd pair into a river bluff raise on a flush completing runout – not so easy. It’s gonna take you a good 15 seconds before you come close to making up your mind.

Even if you consider the exact same spot, but different hands, the timings will be different. If you have A7 and you face a small cbet BB vs BTN on K72r, your decision is very easy – call. You can make that conclusion in about half a second. If you have J8s with backdoor flush however, what do you do? Fold, call or raise? If you’re going to raise, to what size? And how frequently will you do it? If you’re going to play a mixed strategy, you have to randomize it by using a number provided from a software. All of that thinking and deliberating takes time.

Hopefully you can see the obvious issue at play. And here, just like before, there are not many easy ways out of this problem. There will always be easy decisions and difficult decisions in poker. 

Someone that tanks for a long time and then eventually makes the call against a bet is signaling to their opponent that it’s more likely their decision was difficult, rather than easy – simply because easy decision hands would have acted quicker on average, making their weight into a “tank-call range” much lower than the weight of the difficult decisions. On the other hand, if you bet and your opponent snap calls, the probability that he holds a difficult decision hand – like the hands close to the thresholds of calling and folding – decreases significantly. Those hands will belong (with a higher probability) to longer timings. 

Again, it’s important to emphasize that this is not a binary phenomenon, but a probabilistic one. It’s not like easy decisions will never be present in a long timing action range, or that difficult decisions won’t ever be played fast. But the nature of the game and the decisions themselves create a distortion in the probability distribution of the timings for different types of hands.

The only way to mitigate this problem would be to tank with your easy decisions just as long as you would tank with your difficult decisions. In fact, you can see some people doing stuff like that, the most famous one probably being Christof Vogelsang, a high stakes MTT player, who has been the target of criticism by the community for his long tanks in the most trivial spots, like preflop folds:

Exceptions like him aside, 99.9% of players are not actively trying to balance their difficult decision timings. It’s true that professionals sometimes try to manipulate their timings by taking a bit longer to value bet when they hold a very strong hand on the river (as I’m sure you can relate), but such approach is nowhere near sufficient to make different timings balanced. An observant player will always be able to spot imbalances.

Summarizing: different hands offer different difficulties of decision. We tend to act quicker when the decision is very easy, and we naturally take more time to act when the decision is difficult. This creates another distortion in the probability distribution of the hands and their timings. The probability of a quick timing containing “easy decision” hands is higher than the probability of a long timing containing the same hand types; the probability of a long timing containing difficult decision hands is higher than the probability of quick timings containing difficult decision hands. This issue is caused by the nature of the game, in which decisions are not equally difficult, and decisions with different levels of difficulty require different amounts of time to be executed. The only way to mitigate this problem would be to match the typical timing of difficult decisions with the easy decisions by tanking more often with them. 

Figure 3 – Probability Distribution of Easy Decision Hands with action timings (balanced player)

Figure 4 – Probability Distribution of Easy Decision Hands with action timings (real player)

These are the 2 main reasons why timing tells exist. We can’t execute all decisions at the same time, so we prioritize strong hands first. And we can’t make different decisions at the same speed, because more difficult decisions take longer.

At the end of the day, if you really think about it, you can see how all of this is obvious. It’s impossible for these things not to exist – they are inevitable. That’s why I always say that timing tells are not rocket science.

What is more like rocket science is what the hell do you do with that information? How much can you/should you adjust your ranges based on the evidence presented? How do you concatenate multiple bits of timing information until you form the most accurate description of your opponent’s range? How do you discern between mixed timing signals (a quick timing followed by a long timing and vice-versa)? 

All of these advanced range construction parameters is what I’ll cover in my timing tell course later this year. I’ll give you my recommended adjustments for the most important spots of the game tree, from preflop to river, against the typical timings that convey the most information. Which ranges you should play preflop in all the different scenarios, and how you should adjust your ranges postflop to exploit your opponents.

I Until then, checkout the 2 videos below from my channel that will teach how you can start taking advantage of timing tells to make more money. 

How To Exploit Timing Tells | $200z Play & Explain

The Sickest Exploit No One Is Talking About

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See you next week. Until then – keep it simple.

Saulo