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Contrary to what many people believe, poker players don’t often lie about their hands during a hand (although they will often lie about what they had after a hand is over and there is no chance of their hand being revealed). During a hand, they may often seek to use ambiguous language to deceive, but these verbal statements will usually not take the form of direct, disprovable lies.
This pattern means that when a player, during a hand, makes very direct and unambiguous statements about their hand, they’ll often be telling the truth.
To explain this in more detail, here’s an excerpt from my book Verbal Poker Tells:
People dislike lying
As we’ve seen, when poker players seek to deceive, they’ll usually use indirect and ambiguous language. Most indirect or ambiguous hand strength statements aren’t technically lies, because they lack a clear, concrete communication about the speaker’s hand strength. Because direct hand strength statements are rare, lies are also rare.
Even though people have the license to deceive when playing poker, many players dislike and avoid telling lies. Because most players don’t like to lie, we should notice when our opponents make very direct hand strength statements, because there’s a good chance those statements are true.
The main reasons people seem to avoid telling lies are:
- Society teaches us that lying is wrong. Liars are generally looked down upon.
- Lying (keeping track of lies) takes greater mental effort than telling the truth.
- Lying pins a speaker down to one specific story and restrains future verbal behavior.
Mark McClish, a retired federal law enforcement officer, has written two books on lie detection and statement analysis: I Know You Are Lying and Don’t Be Deceived. His books are a result of his long career studying crime and deception, trying to find patterns in spoken and written evidence.
His books have many examples of criminals and suspects using ambiguous language in order to avoid telling a lie—even in those situations where telling a direct lie would be easy and beneficial to the person. Lying seems to go against people’s natures; most people, even hardened criminals and murderers, go out of their way to avoid it.
I think this holds true for most poker players. While many players make ambiguous and indirect statements about hand strength, it’s rare to find someone who lies frequently and directly about their hand strength while in a hand.
There’s a popular conception that everyone lies frequently. Like a lot of popular conceptions, this doesn’t seem to be true. One recent study concluded that people actually tell very few lies (Shalvi, Halevy, and Verschuere, 2014). While people may fairly often tell white lies for social purposes, these will almost always be ambiguous lies or lies of omission, rather than clear, provably false lies. There seem to be a small percentage of people who frequently tell direct lies, but they’re the exception. This seems to hold true at the poker table, too.
Besides not liking to tell lies, most recreational players don’t want to be perceived as liars. Some players see lying, even during a poker hand, as immoral or unethical. You can find many recreational players who are proud of the fact they don’t lie about their hands and who seem to look down on people who lie about their hands. (This is all despite most during-hand forms of deception being accepted as part of the game.)
Even when considering poker players who seem verbally tricky and fully capable of lying, when you actually study their statements you’ll find that these players seldom tell direct, provably false lies; most of their statements are ambiguous or indirect. (For example, Jamie Gold saying: “I’ve been showing a lot of bluffs, I’ll show you.” He’s not directly stating that he’s bluffing; he’s just implying it.) While talkative players may often imply they have a certain hand strength, they don’t often directly state it.
There’s another reason why direct lies are rare: because deception is assumed in poker, there isn’t much obvious benefit to someone who’s willing to lie. In fact, the opposite is probably true; being known for being mostly honest allows a player to get better “use” out of an occasional lie and be more likely to be believed.
Here’s another related excerpt from Verbal Poker Tells:
Indicators of truth-telling
Some hand strength statements are more likely to be true than other statements. The following are some indicators that a player is telling the truth:
Specific hand strength statements
The more specific a hand strength statement is, the more likely it is to be true.
For example, if a player bets the turn and tells you, “I’ve got a set,” you should be more likely to believe him than if he says, “I’ve got a good hand.” He could be lying or telling the truth in either case, but the directness of the first statement makes it more likely to be true than the second statement.
Negative hand strength statements
Statements regarding what hands a player doesn’t have (i.e., negative statements) are more likely to be true than statements regarding what hands a player does have (i.e., positive statements).
For example, the statement “I don’t have pocket fives” is more likely to be true than the statement “I have pocket fives.”
One reason for this is that negative statements only barely define a player’s range. A player can comfortably say something truthful like “I don’t have pocket fives” without worrying that it restricts his perceived hand range much at all. Whereas saying something specific like “I have pocket fives” restricts his range to one specific hand.
Usually negative hand strength statements will be heard as a result of someone asking a player about specific hands. For example, a player asks, “You might have pocket fives.” His opponent responds, “I swear I don’t have pocket fives.”
Promising or swearing about hand strength
If a player “swears” or “promises” that he’s telling the truth, he usually will be. The more excessive this promising is, the more likely it becomes that he’s actually telling the truth. This is because the player is taking more personal “outside-of-game” responsibility for his statement.
Most players, experienced and inexperienced, don’t want to be perceived as unethical. If a player makes an emphatic statement like “I swear to God I have a set and want you to fold,” and he’s found to not be telling the truth, he’ll be remembered as someone willing to emphatically lie to achieve his goals. Most players don’t want this reputation.
Even amongst players who regularly practice deception, they only want to lie enough to achieve their goals. A bluffer may make an untrue statement like: “I have a set, you should fold”; his goal is to get his opponent to fold. He doesn’t want to be perceived as the guy who “swore on his mother’s grave” to sell a lie; he just wants to deceive his opponent enough to get the job done.
In short, when a player makes an emphatic show of promising something about his hand, you should usually listen.
Zachary Elwood is the author of the Reading Poker Tells trilogy of books, which has been translated into eight languages and sold more than 48,000 copies. See more frequently asked poker tells questions.