Bro, for sure! Depending on the moments you delay to make a decision, even if you already know what to do, you can create a lot of doubts and insecurity on your opponents. If you do it in the right spots you can cause your opponent to bet less than they should into their nut hands or even check it when they normally wouldn't, or you can also make them shove bad hands into your nuts by making them to think that you're hesitating or insecure to call.
For example, if the flop comes 9-9-J, your oponent has an J-10. You have a KQ and want to see the turn to try and hit an overpair/straight:
- If you just check, he'll likeliy assume you have nothing and will probably bet for value or bet the pot to fold you and protect his J.
- However, if you actually wait untill your clock almost run out and then check, that suddenly brings a lot of doubts with it.
Its only natural to wonder: "What hand made he spend all this time thinking? Should be an easy check right? Unless..."
And that "unless" might not be enough to scare the villan, but many times it is.
He might actually start to think that you could have a 9, was tempted to bet on flop, but decided to make a slow play.
- When it gets to the turn, if nothing changes and he decides to bet, you might tri-bet to make him even more scared and "confirm" your fake set of triples(not recommended for most times, but sometimes a 2x tribet can do the job).
- If he checks again on the turn you might make a real small bet to make him think you're increasing the pot to hammer the river.(this option is preferred of course because you risk less money and the effect is real, I've made people fold many times doing this).
Anyways, you get the picture, there's a lot of possibilities to play, but its more useful in scary boards with triples, straights and flush, specially if you know the villain didn't hit it.
You can also try to use this when you want to see the rest of the board without paying huge bets, it tends to discourage the villain aggression.
You just got make sure you're not the one being slow played. kkk
Of course delaying won't change you cards, but might truly change the way the board goes down sometimes.
One last thing, you can't be doing that everytime as you might imagine, be selective.
The delay must be a change from your normal pattern to have meaning.
