Q&A #115: How Time Charges Affect Strategy

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Today we have a quick Q&A about playing in a game with a time charge. A time charge is a way for the house to profit from the game. In lieu of a rake on each pot, in a time game the house simply collects a fixed fee from each player at the beginning of each new dealer’s down (typically every half an hour).

For instance, in the game described by today’s questioner, the time charge is $8 per half hour. At the beginning of each down, the dealer collects $8 from each player, and then all the hands are played rake-free.

On to the question from vb_rounder on the message board:

How would an $8/half-hour time charge affect a medium-stack (50-60 BB) strategy in a live $1/$2 cash game? Also consider tips are additional monies being removed from pots won.

Would you alter your strategy to include playing slightly more loosely pf, or simply play a normal tight strategy of raising big pf w/ premium hands, avoiding marginal drawing-type hands, and trying to get all-in on the flop with TP and big draw semi-bluffs?

The answer is simple. A time charge doesn’t affect strategy at all.

A time charge is a sunk cost. It’s a fixed fee. You pay the exact same amount whether you play every hand like a crazy person, or you play like a complete nit. So the money you pay to the house doesn’t affect your strategy at all. You would play exactly the same way in a game with a $2 per half hour time charge as you would in a game with an $8 or a $20 time charge.

Contrast this to a rake, where the way the money is collected can affect your strategy. You pay rake only when you win a pot. So if you play every hand like a crazy person and consequently win a lot of pots, you will pay a lot of rake. And if you play like a complete nit, you will pay significantly less rake.

In addition, rake can affect the odds you get on certain bets. Instead of betting X to win the Y in the pot, you end up betting X to win Y minus $2 or Y minus $4 because of the money removed for the rake. The impact on strategy is generally to encourage slightly tighter play in a raked game. The bigger the rake, the worse odds you get on your bets, and therefore the more often you need to win the pot to make those bets profitable.

Back to the time charge. Since no money is removed from the pots (except for whatever you tip out), the odds remain the same no matter what the time charge ends up being.

As for exactly how you should play a 50-60BB stack – well that’s a complex question that depends heavily on the type of game you’re in. If your opponents are loose and you routinely see 5- and 6-handed raised pots, then by-and-large you’re looking to make good pairs and big draws to shove your money in on the flop with. If your opponents are tight and a preflop raise typically wins the pot outright or gets one or two callers, then you can play a strategy that puts more emphasis on postflop stealing (despite your stack size).

And yes, you can play ever-so-slightly looser in a time game than you can in a raked game, because every pot is just that little extra bit bigger. But the difference is small enough that I’d be hard-pressed to come up with too many practical examples of how I’d alter my play. Most of the examples I might come up with would involve heads-up pots and blind stealing/defense situations. Obviously there can be some hands that are profitable steals in a time game that become slightly unprofitable with a rake.

Finally, $8 per half hour is a bit of a high charge for a $1-$2 game. Unless your opponents are real world-beaters (extremely unlikely in any $1-$2 game), I’d expect you to be able to make an acceptable profit from the game playing a 50-60 BB stack. But you’d probably expect to make maybe $3-5 per hour more in an equivalent game with typical 10% to $4 rake structure.

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