[TNixon]

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but I think there is merit in my suggestion that your insta-raises from position were usually hands that wouldn't withstand a re-raise.

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Think about the logic here for a moment:

Since I *never* vary the size of my raise based on the strength of my hand (I raise the same with AA as I do with 95s), for weaker hands to be an insta-raise while stronger hands were sometimes delayed would have to mean that I was either intentionally delaying sometimes to make my hand look weaker, or that I was having to think for a moment about raising with the stronger ones.

And I can absolutely *guarantee* that neither of those things is happening. All the insta-raise means is that I didn't have another table distracting me at that moment. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

Realistically, though, against somebody who doesn't call OOP too much, a pretty big percentage of my position raises are with hands that can't really stand a pot-sized reraise, especially as the blinds get bigger. (and sometimes I'm too stupid to back off and narrow my raising range when people start coming over the top too often)

So, if you were reraising more often to my insta-raises, and folding more often to the delayed ones, then you were generating false reinforcement to a "tell" you thought you had, in that I probably wasn't folding more often because my hands were weaker on average, but because you were reraising more often. So you looked at series of events with basically a random distribution (the amount of time it took me to raise), saw a pattern (which is absolutely not a bad thing to do, you *should* be looking for patterns wherever you can find them), and then likely created a situation where any further evidence was basically *guaranteed* to reinforce the pattern.

Don't get me wrong, if somebody has something on me, I *love* to hear about it, and I never discard well-intended advice completely out of hand, and there is some possibility that I do have some sort of subconscious delay with stronger hands. I tried to watch for it, but short of recording a video of every game you play and watching after-the-fact, the observer effect makes it practically impossible to watch for something like that.

But, I do think it's highly likely that in this particular case, you gave weight to a timing tell that almost certainly didn't (and logically, almost *couldn't*) exist.

And that can be very dangerous.

Just trying to give a little back. Whether I think it's valid or not, you did try to let me in on something you thought you had picked up on, and I do appreciate that. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]