Immediate calls tell you a lot. In my experience, they polarize someone's hand range to either super-strong or a vulnerable hand like a decent draw or top pair weak kicker. Most often, though, it will be a draw. In this $15-30 limit hand, the guy's immediate call lets you narrow his hand range a lot. I have [As] [Ks] and raise UTG. I get one fairly tight player calling me in the BB. He is ...
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 ...
Genuinely angry call means weakness
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 ...
2011 WSOP: Martin Staszko’s (Possible) Poker Tells
I’ve been reviewing the 2011 WSOP Final Table footage of Staszko and Heinz, trying to pick up some patterns in Staszko’s body language. I haven’t been too successful. The main thing that got in the way of analyzing his body language patterns was that Staszko just didn’t bluff very much. In order to analyze someone’s tells you need to see how they act when they’re putting out a significant bluff ...
Some new book cover concepts
My designer sent me some concepts for the cover that I'd like to share and get feedback on. Keep in mind they're very rough, just to give the general concept. You can click on an image in the gallery below to see it fullscreen. If there's one direction of the following pics you like, please let me know in the comments area or just Tweet at me or email me. Or if you have any other ideas, I'd love ...
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 ...
Self-delusion and overconfidence in poker
Humans are very good at deluding themselves. Nowhere is this more obvious than in poker. I have known many poker players who are mediocre, or even just plain awful, but who are able to convince themselves they are very good at the game. A New York Times article called “Don’t Blink! The Hazards of Overconfidence" highlights how common the delusion of overconfidence can be. It’s focused on stock ...
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 ...
Short-handed limit against a group of friends
Had a really bad short-handed $20-40 session yesterday. Was playing with these 4 guys who were all friends and who joked around and who all went out to dinner together. It was just me and them. They played in such a way that I felt I had zero edge against them as a group, despite feeling they were playing bad individually. This was a weird feeling that I've only gotten a couple times before. I am ...
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 and why not to show opponents AA or KK
Talking about the Gambler's Fallacy in my last post, I was reminded of another poker application of this concept. The situation comes up frequently when you hold AA or KK, and you raise preflop and everyone folds. Some people will show their hands in situations like this, just because it's kind of fun to show big hands. It's also sometimes sort of a way to complain because the raiser didn't get ...
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 ...