This post and the next few posts will be an assortment of behavioral poker tells that helped me in my last $15-30 limit session. I wanted to share them and also write about them in the interest of helping me use them better in a session. Sometimes I get good tells but I don’t fully know the best strategy to make the best use of them. ...
Betting motion behaviors in limit
I've been playing a $15-30 limit game, with a little bit of $20-40, the last few days. I had a few hands I wanted to talk about that pertain to betting motion speed and tendencies. Now that my book has gone to the printers, I've been having a lot of second-guessing and doubting of the way I phrased some things in the book. This is bound to happen, and I try not to beat myself up too much, because ...
Poker tells in limit hold’em: A critique of my book by Philip Newall
I’ve been reading Philip Newall’s book The Intelligent Poker Player (published by TwoPlusTwo). His book is about game theory optimal strategy, and is especially applicable to short-handed and heads-up limit Hold’em. I plan on writing a review of it soon, but in the meantime I’ll just say that I recommend it. Not only does he talk about strategy, he also has really good advice on playing poker for ...
Repetitive body movements and stillness
A guy sent me an email with this question: Just reviewing all my tells info again. Just curious if you had a quick opinion on this: if you have someone who engages in repetitive behavior, and then it stops, what does this mean? What are some examples of this you might see? ...
Loose hand movements associated with high hand strength
I wanted to add another note about Martin Staszko and his tells at the 2011 WSOP ME. One of the biggest hands he got was when he had A9 and got a full house on the turn (click for video link to start of hand). As I stated in the last post, I think he had a lot of physical looseness in this situation, and I think this was due to having such strong cards. I think the looseness/relaxation of his hand ...
Watching the players directly to your left
I played in a $180 buy-in tournament the other day. I got knocked out in 18th out of 85 or so (JJ against AQ and AK all-in pre-flop). I think my observational skills play a big role in me consistently doing well in tournaments (although honestly I haven't played in many decent buy-in ones). I spot a lot of body language stuff when the stacks get low in proportion to the blinds, when people are in ...
Another example of Pius Heinz avoiding eye contact with a big hand
(Apologies: apparently the YouTube video I was linking to for this post has been removed. I will work on trying to find another video and edit this post.) I was reviewing some WSOP footage and saw another very good example of Pius Heinz avoiding eye contact when he hits a big hand. This was the tell I talked about in my last WSOP-related post. This is pre-November-9, when they were nearing the ...
Poker tells at 2011 WSOP Final Table: Pius Heinz’ eye-contact tell
(Apologies; it looks like the YouTube video I linked to for this post and the following post has been removed. I will try to remedy this in the future.) This post is about the most significant poker tell that I saw at the Final Table of the 2011 WSOP NLHE Main Event. It involves Pius Heinz and the amount of eye contact he would make with his opponent in different situations. In a nutshell, Heinz' ...
Situations where poker tells are most important
I noticed a few poker tells I thought were significant in the 2011 WSOP Main Event final table, and I’ll be talking about them for the next couple blog posts. But for the most part, the tells were very few and far between. There were only a handful of moments in the play between the final four players (Heinz, Lamb, Staszko, and Giannetti) where I thought someone’s body language was giving away ...
2011 WSOP ME final table = great poker television
This year’s World Series of Poker Main Event final table was just great poker television. I haven’t been interested in watching televised tournaments for a long time, just because it’s usually so boring. I hate watching tournaments that have been edited, because you don’t get the game flow and they usually choose the most boring all-in situations to show. I also hate seeing the hole cards in ...
“Disclaimers”: a category for some common verbal statements in poker
There is a class of verbal statements you hear a lot in poker that I call disclaimers. These are statements that attempt to explain away, or “disclaim”, the real meaning behind an action. A basic example of this would be when a no-limit tournament player goes all in while announcing something like, “I’ve only got a few chips left. I guess I’ve got to go all-in.” He is implying that him not having ...
A tricky player with a rather unique betting motion tell
I was excited to find a new tell the other day. It’s one I’m surprised I’ve never noticed before, and I wonder if it might be fairly frequent. I’d imagine it might be common amongst the players who think they're being very tricky. There’s this guy who’s been playing the $15-30 game lately who’s a total unpredictable maniac. He will basically play any two when the feeling strikes him, and if he ...
Looking down quickly when betting a weak hand
For some players, an important place to get tells is during the flop continuation bet and turn continuation bet after they have raised pre-flop. There are little tendencies that can give you an indication that the pre-flop raiser either is comfortable betting or uncomfortable betting, and even if these tells are far from being 100% reliable, they still can be significant and influence your play. I ...
Difficulty of categorizing and remembering tells
I think the key to mastering behavioral poker tells is knowing how to efficiently look for and interpret player behavior. What behavior for a player is giving you the most information? What behavior does the player exhibit the most frequently? What behavior is easiest to spot? The answers to all of these questions can be hard to figure out, and some behaviors will be very reliable but hard to ...
Limit players who make it obvious they’re calling your bet
One of the more obvious behavioral tells you can see in any poker game is the “I’m calling you” move, where a player is ready to shove their chips into the pot, or in some cases actually does shove their chips into the pot before the bettor. There are several ways this tell can be displayed, and it means different things depending on a player’s tendencies and the situation, but in limit games this ...
Joe Hachem versus an amateur’s quads
In this hand, Joe Hachem tries to bluff an amateur off of quads on the river. While there are some legitimate reasons Hachem played this hand the way he did, all-in-all I think it was way too likely that the amateur had a huge hand. One of the factors in this hand was the amateur's willingness to talk about the hand and express concern about Joe's hand, which are pretty reliable indicators that a ...
Gambler’s Fallacy in poker. Defensive chip handling tell.
I fell victim to the "gambler's fallacy" the other day at poker. The gambler's fallacy is the belief that because something out-of-the-ordinary has occurred, it will be less likely to occur again. Casinos make a lot of money on this idea with roulette, because many people have a natural tendency to say, "oh, it's been red 5 times in a row, better bet on black", when in reality, the chances of the ...
A hand using poker tells – an introduction to the book
A friend of mine told me I should have a dramatic hand to start the book with, to show an example of using tells in practice, and to get people's attention. I thought it was a good idea. I have a bunch of notes of hands I've played from a long time ago, and I thought the hand I finally decided on was a good one. This is from a hand I played in 2005 in Albuquerque, NM. Names have been changed to ...
Immediate calls and raises, and talking a lot after betting
On the Pokerstars Big Game (season 1, week 2, ep. 3) there's a hand where Daniel Negreanu has the nut straight on the turn, and the millionaire/amateur poker player Jason Calacanis turns a set and fills up on the river. Calacanis shows some common tells. For one, he's super-talkative with a big hand. Also important are his immediate calls and bets, which give away a lot of info. ...
New poker tells book almost done
The book is getting close to being done. It’s working title is currently ‘Reading Poker Tells’. Maybe I’ll throw on a secondary subtitle; something like, "and other psychological tools". I’ve sent out the current version of the manuscript to several poker friends for comments, and I’m awaiting their reviews. The main thing I want to do is to communicate the concepts in a simple, easy-to-understand ...
Bluffing and hand tension
At the last NLHE game I played ($5-10 at Parx Casino outside Phillie), there was a reliable tell that influenced one of my decisions. This one has to do with hand tension when a player was bluffing versus when he was value-betting. ...
“Sick Call” Kenny vs. guy with good hand
I was browsing Twoplustwo.com the other day and saw this thread about Kenny Tran. They call him "Sick Call" Kenny because there've been several televised tournaments where he's made some unbelievable "sick calls" with weak hands. This hand from an old WSOP Main Event makes you wonder about Kenny's live-read skills, though (although he could be a fantastic player, I don't know anything about ...
Some tells in a $5-10 no-limit game
I went to Spirit Mountain Casino (in Grand Ronde, Oregon) this past weekend to study the difference between no-limit tells across a range of three different stakes: $1-3, $2-5, and $5-10. I wanted to do this because I'd been working on some chapters for the book related to how tells differ across stakes and between limit and no-limit. I'll tell you a few interesting observations I made on the ...
Online players, live players, and tell-reading ability
Live players get a bad rap from online players. You can find back-and-forth bickering from players on both sides of the aisle on a bunch of online forum threads. Online players insist live players are mostly horrible donkeys. Live players insist there’s a lot more to live poker than just pure poker skills (like live reads and social skills that increase action). Who’s right? They both are. ...
Looking down when betting. Studying body posture.
Whenever I make a bad read on someone, which will happen occasionally, I get pissed off and start to really study the player and their behavior and try to figure out where I went wrong. It's my way of punishing myself for making mistakes. Basically, I want every stupid thing I do to have something good come out of it, so if I can just get a little bit of knowledge from every stupid thing I do I ...