Had an interesting hand yesterday where I maybe should have made a big hero fold based on a combination of bet-sizing and behavior. It's live $5-10. There's an UTG limp (from a guy who is known for limping big pairs first-in). The guy UTG+1, who is usually loose-passive, not often aggressive, and who has only $600 to start, makes it $30. The sizing is very reliable weakness ...
Portrait of a young cash game grinder
This blog post is about a local pro poker player; we’ll call him Maurice, because he’s low-key and he doesn’t want random people knowing much about him. He’s a young guy, in his twenties, who’s one of the best players on our local poker scene. He went from playing small stakes online ($.05-$.10 NLHE and small buy-in SNGs and MTTs) in 2009 to playing $1-2 live after April 2011, to moving ...
New Live $1-2 Poker Tells Book
I recently put out a new short ebook that analyzes 35 actual $1-2 NLHE cash game hands, most of which I played myself, but a few are from some $1-2 video footage. The book is called Reading Poker Tells in $1-2 No-Limit Cash Games, and it's available on my site here (in three ebook file formats, including Kindle) and in the Kindle store here. It's only $10 and I think this is a great way to get ...
Poker trip to Los Angeles, observing verbal behavior
I spent a week in L.A. at the end of February, playing poker and appearing in a couple episodes of the live-streaming poker show Live at the Bike. I played primarily $5-5 and $5-10 NLHE cash games. I haven’t played much at all in the last few years, so it was an interesting and educational trip, getting back into playing all the time and seeing how people were playing at these stakes. I’d also ...
Players who get more relaxed and talkative when winning
An acquaintance of mine emailed me this story from his home game. This is a small stakes home game: .10 Euro blinds, NLHE. My response follows his email. There's something I realized last saturday. We were playing six handed and of the guys was winning big time. Let's call him Robert. He hit every hand, was paid off every time, it was just his evening. Normally, he is one the more losing ...
A couple of interesting hands from $1-2 NL
Just a couple interesting spots from some recent hands where someone's behavior played a role in my decision-making. First one is from $1-2 NL. I had about $700 and the guy directly to my left had about $600. A couple limpers in front of me. I limp with 46 of diamonds. The guy directly to my left was an older guy who was "tricky", and who liked to make small raises pre-flop as pot-builders in ...
Should have folded top set
This isn't related to poker tells or behavior in any way. Just a hand I played yesterday that I spent a lot of time thinking about so I thought I'd share it. It was a $2-5 game. I only have $400 in front of me. I usually am significantly deeper and my shorter stack plays a role in this hand. This game can vary from super loose to mostly tight and it was in the mostly tight range yesterday. In ...
Immediate bets and calls in a $2-5 hand
I've been much more attuned to bet-timing tells lately, just going out of my way to study it more. I think bet-timing tells are responsible for a lot of the more subtle reads of situations that experienced players can get. I also think a lot of the time this stuff can be analyzed in an instinctual way by experienced players. For instance, in the hand I'm going to describe, I think a lot of ...
No rechecking of hole cards on flush-y board helps define opponent’s range?
Played $2-5 NL today and this hand went down. I raise from CO with 8c8d to $20. I get a call from the big blind. We have a little bit of history because he’s a bit steamed from a hand an hour or so ago where I value-bet a flush for a lot of money on the turn and he made a bad call for all his chips with a straight and lost. I get the feeling he’s a bit steamed at me or at least wants to get some ...
$2-5: An immediate call on the flop and desperate behavior after river bet
This is a $2-5 hand I played the other day. This one was interesting because my opponent's actions added up to make me suspicious enough to make a river call, in a spot that I ordinarily would have folded from a fundamental perspective. It’s also interesting because he was doing a lot of stuff (like talking and showing his neighbor his cards) that will usually mean a good hand, but in this case ...
$2-5: quick call of turn bet indicates probable draw
This hand is from a $2-5 NL full ring game. Long story short: my opponent called a substantial turn bet very quickly, and I should have thought more about what his action meant. I should have come to the conclusion that his quick call meant that he was most likely drawing, which means I should have bluffed the river. ...
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 ...
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 ...
Great live poker advice from Limon
Limon is the twoplustwo.com handle of a high-stakes no-limit player who lives in Los Angeles. He's been playing professionally for 10 years at places like the Commerce. In 2009, he started a thread in the High Stakes NL forum with a bunch of his thoughts on the game. That thread has stayed near the top of the forum for the last two years, and Limon has continually revisited it to answer questions, ...
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. ...
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. ...
Pre-flop looking-at-hole-cards tell
In the most recent session I played (Parx Casino $5-10 NLHE), there were a couple hands where tells came into play. In this post and the next, I’ll talk about a couple physical tells I spotted that influenced the way I played my hand. The tell in this post involves the length of time a pre-flop raiser would look at his hole cards. ...
Parx Casino $5-10 NLHE Trip Report
I got a chance to play an 8-hour $5-10 NL session at Parx Casino, outside of Philadelphia, PA. The cardroom was very nice; they have 64 tables, and the place seems well-run and is pleasant to be in. They only had one $5-10 NLHE game, but had several $2-5 games and a bunch of $1-2 games. They also had a couple $15-30 limit games going on, so the action was decent. Probably the coolest thing ...
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 ...
Poker in St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands
Sharky's Last week I was on the island of St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands. I couldn't find hardly anything online searching for 'St. Thomas poker'. A lot of people said that there was no place to play cards on St. Thomas; that you had to go to St. Croix to find a poker game at the casinos there. But I did find, on a nightlife-themed website, a small mention of one place advertising a ...
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 ...