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Some poker players are skeptical about using poker tells. This is understandable; after all, poker tells are never going to be 100% reliable (although sometimes you will be highly certain in a read).
I’m going to share an edited piece that I wrote for Upswing Poker. Here are some of the key takeaways that help explain why poker tells, even thought they’re fallible, can make players better:
- Being wrong sometimes doesn’t mean using poker tells is bad. All exploitative poker decisions involve uncertainty. Deciding to raise and call an overly aggressive player more frequently can be a good adjustment even if you happen to run into strong hands sometimes; behavioral adjustments work the same way.
- Behavioral edges matter the most in close decisions. Even a tell that’s only somewhat reliable can improve your decisions over the long run. If calling and folding are already close in expected value, even a modestly reliable tell can help push you toward the better choice.
- Some tells are highly reliable. Most behavioral information is ambiguous, but some tells are highly reliable. Learning tells, at the very least, can help you spot those behaviors that are highly reliable, even if you wanted to avoid acting on the more ambiguous information.
- Studying tells also teaches you how to avoid giving away information yourself. Even players who rarely act on tells can benefit by recognizing and eliminating their own behavioral leaks.
- Tells should supplement good poker strategy, not replace it. Strategy and fundamentals matter much more. The value of tells comes from adding another source of information on top of an already sound strategic approach.
- The goal isn’t to get every read right; it’s to make slightly better decisions over many, many hands. If behavioral information moves your decisions in the right direction more often than the wrong direction, studying tells has made you a better poker player.
What follows is an abridged version of the guest blog post I wrote for Upswing Poker. The full piece starts with some concerns and criticisms that Doug Polk had about reading and using tells, which I reference below.
Does studying tells help or hurt you as a poker player?
We should recognize that Doug’s objections to using physical tells (i.e., they’re sometimes wrong) can just as easily be applied to any exploitative, non-game-theory-optimal approach to poker. I’ll include an excerpt from my last book, Exploiting Poker Tells, here, that deals with that idea:
It’s important to understand: When you decide to incorporate poker tells into your game, your reads will sometimes be wrong. This is completely expected and inevitable. For all exploitative strategies (i.e., strategies aimed at exploiting opponent flaws), your decision will sometimes be wrong in a specific hand.
To give a strategic, non-tell-related comparison: When an opponent has been three-betting pre-flop every single hand, and you make an exploitative decision to four-bet him light, he will sometimes have pocket aces. This doesn’t mean your exploitative decision was wrong. You made your decision because you thought it would be profitable in the long run. You hopefully didn’t expect that it would be correct every time you did it.
In the same way, acting on opponent behavior is a numbers game. If you have a read that is slightly reliable, or even very reliable, it will sometimes be “wrong” in the context of a single hand. This doesn’t necessarily mean that it was a bad read.
I wanted to point this out because I think some people, when they make a read and it turns out to be wrong, get frustrated with trying to use poker tells. This is understandable, because it is frustrating to make a move or a fold based on a read, only to discover you were completely off-base. You’re using a more speculative source of data, so it is understandable that it stings more when you’re wrong. “If I’d only played the hand the normal way,” you might think, “I wouldn’t have messed up.”
But you should remember that, if you’re reading opponents well in general, you will be right more often than you are wrong and that will improve your results. It’s just usually much easier to remember the times you were wrong than the times you were right.
Doug could just as easily have said, “I see so much when people just guess wrong” about non-behavior-related adjustments to an opponent’s frequencies. But I don’t think Doug would object to using the more obvious/demonstrable changes in an opponent’s strategy as basis for decisions (although I think he would probably say that people also base decisions on those things too frequently, too).
For example, I don’t think Doug would object to adjusting a river-bluff range based on an opponent who has been shown in many hands to fold too much on the river. And aside from player-specific history, I also think there are probably certain general lines from recreational-seeming players that Doug would feel okay making exploitative adjustments to (for example, maybe raising or calling unusually small bets lighter than normally). Both of these have analogies for behavior-based decisions: noticing player-specific behavioral patterns, or noticing behaviors that, even without any player history, are usually reliable for recreational players.
As the excerpt above talks about, I think for most players there can be negative emotion around using what is perceived as a more-speculative/less-known source of information. And I would imagine this is especially true when you have become a very good player based on a primarily GTO approach to the game.
If we look at physical/verbal tells as a similar thing to perceived changes in opponent frequencies, then I think we have a more realistic view of how tells can be on a spectrum from very obvious and likely to be reliable to less obviously reliable and more ambiguous.
Here’s where I think learning about tells can be very valuable for players:
- Defense. The readers of my books and videos, many of whom are not experienced players, will mostly not make good use of that information in regards to reading opponents. This is simply because many are not experienced enough to use that info and will misuse it or misapply it in many ways. But where those players do see a lot of value in my stuff is in learning how to eliminate their own tells. I’ve had many customers send me messages saying, basically, “I was doing such-and-such a lot until I read about it in your book.” Fixing such leaks probably improve win rates (or decrease loss rates) more than using that info to read others.
- Very obvious tells exist. Most tells are on the ambiguous “This probably means that” side, but obvious tells do exist. My blog posts, books, and videos talk about many of the common somewhat-reliable, more ambiguous patterns, but also a good amount of the super-reliable variety. (Speaking of very reliable tells, I once tweeted “If Jay is bluffing here, I’ll eat my hat” during the no-hole-cards live airing of the 2013 WSOP Main Event, based solely on Farber’s behavior. Ryan Riess made a daring call with Queen high and Farber had the flush.) Even if a tells-skeptical, GTO-focused player like Doug only deviated from his usual strategy when he saw tells that a majority of skilled live players would consider very reliable, that would represent an improvement to his win rate.
- Even less-reliable tells can be used for tough/borderline spots. Let’s assume you have good reason to believe a tell (general or player-specific) is only slightly reliable: that’s still meaningful and actionable information. If you’re in a spot where you could go either way, that information will help you in the long run, even if you’re wrong in specific spots. This may especially be the case when playing strong opponents who play in a balanced way and who often will put you in spots where your decision between calling or folding is close to neutral EV. And this is how many skilled live players have told me tells play a role in their game; when they’re in a spot they think is fundamentally break-even, they may use some small piece of behavioral information (a player’s loose back-and-forth glances at them, an opponent’s breathing, whether an opponent pushed in chips or not when saying “all in”) to make up their mind. Assuming they have good reason to think that behavioral info is reliable (which, I agree with Doug, is something to be skeptical about for many players), then those decisions will be made better in the long run.
So, to summarize: Tells are a very small part of playing strong live poker. And I agree with Doug Polk that many live poker players are wasting a good amount of time and money in 1) thinking too much about poker tells at the expense of thinking more about strategy, and 2) making reads too often based on behavioral information they don’t have good reason to believe will be accurate.
Having said that, I also think that, as long as you have a realistic viewpoint that tells will be used infrequently (especially versus strong players), then I think learning about poker tells will 1) protect you from leaking info, and 2) lead to many +EV spots, even for players who only want to base decisions on the most reliable patterns.
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.