What is Time Bank?

A time bank is a reserve of extra seconds an online poker player can spend on a single decision after the ordinary clock for that action has run out. Live, a player simply takes the time until someone calls a clock on them. Online the software has to finish the hand, so the reserve is what stands between a hard decision and an automatic fold. Every action carries a short standard clock, a handful of seconds, which is enough for a routine call or fold. When it expires the time bank begins draining, second by second, and the hand stays live until the player acts or the reserve is empty. How it comes back is where rooms differ. Some top it up slowly and continuously, some restore a fixed allowance at set intervals or at a new tournament level, and some sell extra seconds as a chargeable add-on. It exists so that a disconnection or a genuinely close read is not settled by the clock, and it does that job. It is also information. Who reaches for it, and at which point in a hand, is readable by anyone paying attention, and a player who only tanks when weak has told the table something. The structural cost is that someone playing many tables at once can spend a whole bank on one of them and time out on another while doing it.