In June of 2019, I ran an essay contest. I’ll be posting the four winners of these on the blog. Here’s the first one. This is from Keith Troell.
How Zachary Elwood’s books and videos have improved my poker game
by Keith Troell
Here’s a tell from the Exploiting Poker Tells book that has repeatedly saved me a fortune. It’s “Hand #99: Bet hesitation is a sign of strength.” This river tell is illustrated in the book by a hand from a limit game, but I find it especially true in pot limit and no limit, and I find it extremely reliable. When action is on the given player, his betting becomes very leisurely. He’ll grab some green chips and put them in front of his stack and look at them, then he might put some back and replace them with reds, then look at them again, almost as if he were judging an artistic composition. This can go on for an unbelievably long time as compared to his normal bet timing. I had seen this before but never thought to correlate it before reading your books.
Naturally, now that I recognize this behavior, I think of those who don’t see it as dunces. I don’t think I’ve had a session recently where I watched a bettor haltingly put together his river bet without screaming inside my head, “Don’t call! He’s got it!” only to watch his opponent put his money in. So that’s a double payoff: saves money and provides smug self-satisfaction.
Here’s another one from the same book that I kick myself for not realizing sooner: “Hand #102: Studying an opponent before call…”
I do this all the time now. When I know I’m going to call the river and see all the cards, I wait a moment and observe my opponent. I try not to stare at him directly, I usually stare off into space while leaving him in my peripheral vision. This has provided me with so much useful information, that it’s almost like stealing. How did I not think of this?
The biggest improvement to my game was from the Verbal Tells book. In the games I play, everybody’s always talking. I had suspected there was a gold mine of information to be had, but often I couldn’t make heads or tails of it. These tells are so profitable because they are so common and so frequent. They all have to be correlated to the player because better players are aware of them and try to be tricky using them. Three big ones are:
- Misdirection. Very common and very reliable. Statements like “Let’s see where this kid’s heart lies”, “Let’s see if anybody else has the guts to play”, “He’s always raising me”, and “He’s always attacking my blinds,” are common in my local Texas games. I also hear them all the time in the mid-stakes limit games in Las Vegas, especially from locals attempting to grind, and where they always imply the opposite of what they verbalize.
- Defensive statements such as “I could bet, but I’ll just check,” (as in Lamert from the Heartland Poker Tour), and “If you bet, I can’t call,” (similar to what you quote Farha as saying on High Stakes Poker).
- Questioning, which I think of as “unstressed questioning,” as in “How much are you playing?” and “Do you have the flush?” when the player has the flush beat.
If I’m going to look for something, I want to look for something that can be found (and these acts of discovery are what keep the analytic momentum going). In the movies, when the villain demolishes an oreo cookie at the table, it is an act ripe with significance. That’s bully for screenwriters, but how often can I hope my opponents will do that in real life? At the poker table, never.
So what do I look for? Your books provide practical examples: Is the player relaxed or focused? Fearful or confident? Etc. etc. There’s a high probability that he falls in one of these dichotomies, and noting these mental states can bring immediate rewards.
The greatest strengths of these books is the “baby steps” approach. For example, how do I know what a given player looks like when relaxed? Reading Poker Tells: “The best way to begin observing a player’s tendencies is to first observe him when he has a strong hand and is relaxed.” Once we see him with a strong hand, we know how it looks.
So here is the body of work’s biggest strength: rather than providing a simple list of behavioral tics and their possible meaning, it has systematized the whole endeavor — first with broad categories, and then finer gradations of significant meaning.
P.S. Briefly on the video series, which I highly recommend:
The videos are unbelievably good. When I read Zach’s books, I would picture players I had witnessed performing these actions, but seeing the videos shows different manifestations of the tell, perhaps in ways I have never seen, or in ways that I missed. It increased my observational powers.
Most of the videos are a perfect length — around 15 minutes which is long enough to go into detail and short enough to keep my attention.
Zach’s observational power exceeds anything I have come across before, and it’s frightening to think that my opponents might have equal abilities.