Every Hand Revealed by Gus Hansen I'm the author of the books Reading Poker Tells and Verbal Poker Tells and this is a review of Gus Hansen's book Every Hand Revealed. This book is a hand-by-hand breakdown of his win of the Aussie Millions World Poker Tour tournament, where he waded through 747 players and won $1.2 million. The book doesn’t include every single hand, of course (not his ...
Review of “Ultimate Guide to Poker Tells”
Ultimate Guide to Poker Tells by Randy Burgess and Carl Baldassarre First of all, there is nothing “ultimate” about this book. It’s bad and I wouldn't make that statement lightly. While reading this book, I went back and forth several times about how much blame should be directed toward the authors. On the one hand, they are self-proclaimed micro-stakes amateur players, and don’t try to act ...
Creating a loose, careless image in no-limit
This weekend I was thinking about the ideal image you want to have when you're playing no-limit Hold'em. Here are the main things I want my opponents to be thinking about me: I want my opponents to think it's hard to bluff me. I want my opponents to think I'm loose enough to have any two cards in any situation. I want my opponents to think I don't care about the money. These are all ...
Most useful tells in limit poker
I’ve been playing more limit hold'em lately, and I’ve put some thought into the tells that are most useful at limit versus the most useful ones at no-limit. Obviously there’s a lot less psychological pressure in limit, which makes for less tells. And the regular players, even the horrible ones, are accustomed to the common situations of the game and therefore give away less information. But ...
Importance of a tight image in fixed limit hold’em
This past weekend I returned to playing a $15-30 limit game, after spending the last few months mostly playing $100 multi-table live tournaments. Returning to limit after playing so much no-limit is a bit like suddenly having your hands tied behind your back. It is of course night and day from no-limit: a completely different game. Despite feeling a bit constrained and maybe a little impatient, ...
The importance of poker tells in poker
Just because I focus on how to read physical tells on this website does not mean that I rank this skill as more important than other skills in poker. I think it can be, similar to the psychological understanding I talked about in another post, what separates a great player from a very good player. ...
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 ...
Movement and stillness when bluffing
There's this weird old man that I frequently play with in this $100 tournament. His actions and mannerisms perplex me - he's just a weird old dude and I can't ever tell where he's coming from. He plays like a nit when he has an average stack but double him up and it's very hard to get him out of a pot. I generally have avoided any sort of bluff with him just because he's so unpredictable and is ...
Kido Pham vs Doug Lee: verbal trickery and making speeches
In honor of recently finishing the infamous Doug Lee thread on Twoplustwo, I'll devote a little time to examining a hand between Lee and Kido Pham. In this hand, Doug Lee raises with K2 and Pham calls in position with TJ. The flop comes KQ9, with Pham flopping the straight. Pham checks and Lee bets. Pham calls. The turn comes a blank. Pham checks and Doug Lee goes all in and it's all ...
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. ...