I recently appeared on Steve Barton's Heads-up Poker Podcast, talking about tells in a 2018 Big One for One Drop hand. The hand was submitted by a listener to that podcast, and I was glad they submitted it because I haven't been watching much WSOP coverage this summer and I might have missed it otherwise. The hand features a pre-flop shove from millionaire Rick Salomon (also known as the guy ...
Email from reader about verbal clues in hand
This is an email I got from a reader and thought it was a good example of the kinds of verbal clues of attention/non-focus you can pick up in multi-way pots. Here's the email, with my response to him following: Hello, Here is a funny situation that happened a week ago in a local club where I play once a week. It’s a small stake cash game with a mix of experienced and newbie players and all ...
Poker tells at a Chicago poker tournament
This past weekend I went to a Windy City Poker charity tournament in Chicago. I played a couple interesting hands that featured a good amount of reliable poker tells, which I’ll share below. The tournament was a $1,000 buy-in one; it got about 50 players. It had one featured table, with RFID sensors and camera coverage, that switched players once every hour. The episodes didn’t stream live but ...
A couple televised poker hands and analysis
The following is an email from Thomas Hutchinson, a reader of my books, interspersed with my responses: "Firstly I just want to say thank you very much for writing both Verbal Poker Tells and Reading Poker Tells, I have read both books cover to cover many times and would consider them the best poker tell books out on the market at the moment. So thanks again :) I have a couple of questions which ...
WSOP mention & early-hand ostentatious behavior
I got a few texts from friends the other night, telling me I’d gotten another shout-out from Norman Chad on the latest WSOP episode. Here’s the clip below; the hand starts at 29:30: Dan Smith goes to raise with Qc 9c and drops a chip. He smiles sheepishly and says emphatically, "Terrible omen; I'm going to make it 90 thousand anyway." He then slams down his chips in an exaggerated ...
Immediate calls – a badly written chapter of my book
A reader, David Monath, sent me an email about my book Reading Poker Tells yesterday, pointing out some inconsistencies in the “Speed of calling” chapter, specifically what I say about immediate calls and what they mean. I wanted to address the inconsistencies here for the benefit of people who read the book. ...
Silence in previously talkative guy equals discomfort
A few of us in the $15-30 game had been talking about the local school systems, with most of us even talking while we were playing hands. It was a kill pot, so it became $30-60, and this one guy who had been talking a lot, raised it under-the-gun. There was a slight confusion about something, and the floor was called to figure it out. In this interim, the raiser was completely quiet and seemed ...
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? ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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. ...
Betting movement tells – betting forcefully vs. betting gently
I’ve been thinking a lot about betting motion tells over the past few weeks. The last few sessions I’ve played, I’ve been focusing on player hand movements—I’ve been wearing my baseball cap real low and watching people’s hands as they bet or raise. I’m going to devote this post and the following post to betting movements – in this post I’ll talk about general theory and tendencies, and in the next ...
Direct eye contact after betting and what it usually means
In the last tournament I played ($340 buy-in) there were only a few hands where physical tells and mannerisms played a significant role in how the hands went down. I'll spend a couple posts talking about some of the more interesting hands. This hand came up just a few hands before I got knocked out. We were down to the final 18 players on the final two tables. Average chip stack was 140,000. I ...
Freeze-up bluff tell in $30-60 Limit Hold’em hand
I had a couple interesting hands this weekend in the $15-30 game. There were only a few hands where tells played a big part in how I played. The one I'm going to tell you about involves a very common tell, but it’s not one that’s usually so obvious at fixed limit games. It’s usually one you see a lot more at no-limit. But I think that limit is the perfect training ground for learning how to ...
Limit player who holds chips defensively
Live fixed-limit, full-ring Hold'em hands that interest me enough to spend much time analyzing them are pretty rare, just because so many of the decisions are pretty straight-forward. I've got a hand here from a few days ago that I've been thinking a while about. It's a hand I probably could have played a bit better and that seems obvious in hindsight. The hand involves a couple of common tells so ...
Threatening-to-turn-cards-over tell
The threatening-to-turn-your-hand-over move is a pretty common tell you'll see at low stakes and sometimes medium stakes. You can often see it happen very clearly when a guy bets, another guy goes to call, and the bettor, almost in a threatening manner, prepares to flip his cards over. It can sometimes appear like some comical Western stand-off, with the one guy getting ready to draw his gun (or ...
Staring at hole cards usually means a weak hand
I want to talk about a tell that is very, very useful against many mediocre players. But it's also a tell you can catch a lot of pretty experienced players exhibiting, too. Here it is: The longer someone looks at their hole cards during their initial look at them, the weaker the cards are. Relatedly, though less useful, some players will look away very quickly from strong hole cards. ...
Three major misconceptions about poker tells
I want to cover some very basic and very practical information on tells. I wanted to talk about three of the most common misconceptions about poker tells. First off, let's start with the much-repeated but not-well-understood adage from Mike Caro that almost everyone knows: Strong means Weak, Weak means Strong. This idea, that people who act strong are holding a weak hand, and people who act ...