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Let’s first start with a definition of “false” or “reverse” tells, as this can be more difficult to talk about than you may think. False/reverse tells are, I think most people would agree, behaviors players deliberately use to suggest the opposite of their actual hand strength. That may sound simple but it can get quite complex. For example, who defines what they typical meanings of behaviors are? In order to deliberately communicate something, people must agree on what the communication channels and usual meanings of behaviors are, and that is seldom true in poker; much is ambiguous and ill-defined. Also, many well known tells involve someone displaying indicators of hand weakness when they’re actually strong or displaying indicators of hand strength when they’re weak, so in that sense that kind of first-level reversal (which some people might, I think mistakenly, call a reverse/false tell) is already a tell in itself (at least to more experienced poker players), so a reverse tell would involve a second order reversal (like weak-means-weak).
All this is to help explain why I consider false/reverse tells to be when a player seems to reverse the usual, typical meaning of a poker tell. I say “seems to” because it will often be hard, in practice, to know what exactly a player is doing or thinking. It can also be very subjective as to what constitutes the normal meaning of a behavior.
One example to give you a sense of how I’m using the term and how it might differ from how some other people use it: a fairly reliable tell in poker is that a player making a big bet who says, “I might be bluffing,” or otherwise weakens their hand range, is unlikely to be bluffing. I do not consider that to be a reverse tell because these kinds of reversals are common in a directly competitive game environment like poker. I would consider the reverse tell to be if that player were bluffing and said, “I’m bluffing,” because that is a pretty rare display that goes against the way it is typically displayed.
Tells that reverse typical meanings are more rare than you think
Many people assume it’s common in poker for players to fake and reverse common tells. This perception comes from the many media depictions in movies and TV where people are engaging in complex leveling wars and dramatic fakery. I’m someone who has studied poker tells for a long time, and some people are surprised when I tell them that reverse tells are quite rare in poker.
Here’s a brief rundown for the reasons for that:
- An opponent’s interpretation is hard to predict. One rarely knows how much an opponent know about tells, or whether they’ll recognize that one is trying to manipulate them.
- Each added layer makes the guesswork worse. With reverse-reverse tells (and reverse-reverse tells and beyond), you have to predict what your opponent thinks you think they know (and so on).
- Staying unreadable is much simpler and less stressful than complex “leveling wars.” In the high-stakes footage I’ve studied, serious players rarely seemed to engage in these leveling wars; most appeared to favor restrained behavior instead.
- Bluffers don’t want to look stupid. A bluffer who attempts a reverse tell (doing something associated with weakness when holding a weak hand) might actually induce a call and then feel very foolish. This dynamic contributes to the general pattern of bluffers being more restrained and stoic and players with strong hands being more behaviorally loose and unrestrained.
To help ex
plain this in more detail, I’ll include an excerpt from a post I made on Substack about false tells and “leveling”:
Why are reverse/false tells so rare?
In my books and videos, I’ve talked about the general point that reverse tells (and above) are quite rare. Why are they so rare?
The primary reason is that, in a competitive environment where deception is assumed, it’s hard to predict how one’s actions will be interpreted. This is especially the case when it comes to tells, as usually there’s no easy way to tell what someone’s knowledge of tells is like. Even if you did know what an opponent’s knowledge of tells was like, if they in turn know that you’re a decent player and that you know something about tells, this sets the groundwork for all sorts of uncertainty about how things will go.
Note that all that is true for a reverse tell. It becomes even more confusing for a reverse-reverse tell (and above). You’ll be trapped in a world of confusion and second-guessing yourself. And this is why people don’t much attempt it. Just think about it for yourself for a bit: think about how you’d try to perform a reverse-reverse or reverse-reverse-reverse behavior versus an opponent. Or think about how you, as someone facing a behavior, would try to figure out if someone was reverse-reversing or reverse-reverse-reversing a tell?
Trying to think about what to do, and how it will be perceived, at higher levels just becomes madness; like trying to navigate a car while looking through a kaleidoscope.
Even just reverse tells (level 2) are much more rare than I used to assume they were. I used to study a lot of footage of high-stakes games, and I expected to run across a good number of “leveling” wars with some reverse tells in the mix; but no, they were extremely rare. Any interesting behaviors I found were mostly just more subtle versions of the most common tells. (Now, there’s a chance some of those common tells were actually level 3 reverse-reverse tells but I almost never got an impression there was much in the way of complex leveling going on.)
That said, such “leveling wars” become a bit more common when serious players play with each other often. But in general my understanding is that almost all serious regular players would strive for behaviorally GTO approaches: just trying to be stoic/unreadable in important situations.
Level 2+ behaviors from bettors will mostly be strong hands
But here’s the important part of this: When someone making a significant bet does attempt to get behaviorally tricky, they’ll usually have a strong hand. The reason for this has to with the uncertainty and anxiety just discussed: it’s hard to figure out how an opponent will react to a behavior. Therefore the people willing to try it at all will tend to be quite relaxed.
But there’s an additional reason here that adds to this pattern: bluffers don’t want to look stupid. Bluffing is already stressful enough. A bluffer doesn’t want to try some risky, uncertain strategy (e.g., a reverse tell like saying “I’m bluffing”), be called, and then have to deal with the feeling that his behavior induced a call. Better to keep stoic and quiet; better to stick to the usual script.
The fear of looking stupid plays a big role in such spots, in my opinion (and I think it plays a role in a lot of games and competitive situations). It constrains people’s behavior.
Want to read more about this? Read the entire piece I posted on Substack.
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.