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A common question people have is: How often do poker tells come in handy? How often are they used?
The answer to that can depend on a lot of factors, and I’ll explain some of those in a second. But maybe the best way to answer this succinctly is to say how often I, a poker tells book author, have used poker tells. In a standard $2-5 NHLE or $5-10 NHLE cash game I’d play, a nonverbal or verbal behavior would influence a decision usually only 2 to 4 times in an 8-hour session. That number could deviate out of that range substantially, but that’s a rough average. I’ve played few tournaments, but the few I did play, this average held up well.
There are a lot of misconceptions out there about poker tells. Some people who know little about poker have a conception that playing great poker is all about making reads constantly and picking off bluffs based on reading tells. TV shows and movies, like Rounders and Maverick and many others, help spread this myth of the poker professional who is constantly reading their opponents.
The truth is that nonverbal/verbal behavior in poker, just like those behaviors in real-world domains, is usually quite hard to interpret, and it’d be a mistake to often be basing decisions on what is highly ambiguous behavior. This is something I emphasize in my books and videos. In fact, after my first book, Reading Poker Tells, was released in 2012, I realized based on a few people’s feedback that I hadn’t made that clear enough. I had mentioned these points but they came pretty far into the book, so I went back and added it to the very first chapter, because it seemed like the responsible thing to do to highlight that early (especially because some people might stop reading early, or might skip around in the book).
Another important point to know is that, despite the common mainstream perceptions of poker tells, a good number of decisions you base on behavior/tells will not be about an opponent’s big bet, but about smaller, early-hand behaviors. For example, thinking that someone who raised pre-flop doesn’t seem that focused/stoic, as you’d expect him to usually be with a big hand, and using that as a reason to three-bet them. A little known secret when it comes to poker tells is that these small early-hand behaviors are sometimes a bigger game changer than are the big-bet reads, and that they can be quite valuable even as they’re far from 100% reliable. (That said, the big-bet reads involve much larger sums of money than the early-hand-read-influenced decisions, so it only takes one big-bet read to be worth more than many early-hand reads.)
Another big factor here, too: you will sometimes get a read on someone that doesn’t actually affect your decision. For example, an opponent bets on the river and seems to you quite relaxed in various ways, either nonverbally or verbally or both. But you were already planning on folding to them anyway, because you have rarely seen them bluff. This kind of thing happens a good amount. Put another way: behavior will change a decision less often than the number of times you notice interesting and theoretically actionable behavior.
I’ll go into a list of factors for what can affect how often tells are used:
- Opponent skill and experience: if your opponents are less skilled and experienced, you’ll generally find more behaviors to act on. At lower stakes, you’ll tend to find more actionable tells.
- Your own poker tells knowledge and experience: an experienced live-poker player will generally be better at spotting actionable behaviors than someone new to poker. Also, I explained how often I myself use poker tells, but it’s possible someone much more experienced at poker than I am, someone like Phil Ivey, uses tells more often than I do.
- Tournament vs cash game: Tournaments, especially in their later stages, will tend to have more players trying quite hard to be stoic, compared to cash games, where people’s behaviors are often quite unrestrained and less stoic. I think you’ll tend to find a higher number of interesting and actionable behaviors in cash games. Then again, the heightened intensity of a tournament, and the fact that a good number of those players will have never been in the intense late stages of a tournament, can actually lead to more behavioral variations of certain types (e.g., neck pulse and breathing-related tells I think are more actionable in tournaments, just due to the intensity involved). All in all, I think it will often be a wash in terms of average usefulness between tournaments and cash games; the important point is just recognizing that they can be very different environments, with different factors at work.
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.