Time controls for Holdem

  

Time controls for Holdem


Back to forum


Michael Sharland    (2008-11-26)
Time controls for Holdem

It seems clear that most holdem tournaments are going to require 200-600 moves to complete. This seems to indicate that the time control probably needs to be accelerated from 1 move / day in order to finish these in a reasonable time. Given that the thinking time needed for poker is only a few seconds rather than hours or days, the time needed for a move should be much less than for Chess or Go.

Some ideas might be to:

1) reduce the time control further to 1 move / 12 hours or even less.

2) cap the maximum days at 30 or so.

3) change the format to 2 out of 3 rather than 3 out of 5.

Anyway, just some thoughts.


Thibault de Vassal    (2008-11-26 21:58:40)
Time controls for Holdem

Correspondence time controls (> 1 day) are very delicate to manage. If we set an increment inferior to 1 day, it may provoke some problems with a few players trying to find some tricks to win on time or at least to keep a time pressure on their opponents (most players sleep during the night yet :)). With the current time control, most players still seem to play fastly and, of course, do not hope to win on time. And last but not least, this is much less stressful than rapid chess tournaments :)

However the maximum days could be inferior for poker, that's right, but let's see... I'm not sure it is really necessary to change something yet.