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There are a huge number of poker tells and behavioral patterns you can look for. But some are much more useful than others. Here I want to focus on the behaviors I think are most important and most worth paying attention to. I’ll divide these into two main categories:
- Behaviors from players who are checking, calling, or making smaller bets
- Behaviors from players making big bets.
Important tells from players who are not making big bets
Longer looks at hole cards
Longer looks at hole cards can be quite meaningful. Most players with very strong hands don’t have much reason to look at their cards for very long. Longer looks are more likely to be associated with medium-strength or weak hands.
As with all tells, this isn’t something you should treat as a hard rule, but it can help weaken someone’s range.
Quick calls
Quick calls are another important pattern.
For example, you’ll sometimes see someone quickly call a raise, three-bet, or four-bet preflop. That can narrow their range toward a good-but-not-great hand.
This can be useful on the flop, too. When someone calls quickly in a defensive-seeming way, that can make very strong hands less likely. With a very strong hand, players will often have some motivation to think longer about their decision and consider their options.
Ostentatious behaviors
There’s a whole category of behaviors I think of as ostentatious behavior. These are especially useful early in a hand, from players who aren’t the aggressor or who are making relatively small bets.
The basic idea is that conspicuous, attention-getting behavior can make it more likely that someone isn’t very mentally focused on the hand. And a lack of focus can weaken their range.
Some examples:
- Checking with a lot of force
- Shuffling or playing with cards before checking
- Staring conspicuously at an opponent
- Making an unusually forceful or immediate bet
- Laughing, smiling, or talking a lot
- Moving around or looking around conspicuously
For example, if someone puts in a preflop raise with an unusual amount of force, I’ll be a little more likely to three-bet them. Similarly, I might be more likely to call an unusually forceful flop bet.
The individual behavior isn’t necessarily meaningful by itself. The broader thing I’m looking for is evidence that the player isn’t very focused on the hand.
The most important big-bet poker tells
A screenshot from my video on important poker tells (see bottom of page for the video)
Big-bet situations are where poker tells become especially valuable. These are the spots where the difference between a strong hand and a bluff matters most. The farther along in the hand you are, the more hand strength is defined, and the more likely you are to find polarized imbalances in behavior. there are several behaviors I try to pay close attention to.
Eye contact and eye movements
Eye behavior is one of the most important categories.
People often focus on where someone looks, but I think the quality of someone’s eye movements can be just as important.
Do they look around loosely? Are they blinking normally? Are their eyes dynamic and relaxed? Or are they staring rigidly at one place?
Looser, more dynamic eye movements tend to be associated with relaxation and stronger hands. More rigid eye behavior can be associated with tension.
This is especially worth watching with recreational players and other players whose behavior varies significantly from hand to hand.
Bet timing, pauses, and hesitations
Bet timing is another major category.
As a rough tendency, the longer someone thinks before making a big bet, the stronger their range tends to be. Bluffers often prefer to bet within a more normal amount of time because they have an incentive to convey confidence and avoid looking uncertain.
But one of the lesser-known things I focus on isn’t simply the total amount of time before a bet. It’s the pauses and hesitations involved in physically making the bet.
Watch how someone gathers their chips.
The more pauses and hesitations you see as they assemble a big bet, the more likely they are to be relaxed and strong. Similarly, if someone announces “bet” or “raise” and then takes a while before actually putting the chips in, that pause can be a sign of relaxation.
So don’t just measure bet timing. Pay attention to the entire process: verbal declarations, pauses, hand movements, chip gathering, and any hesitations along the way.
Most importantly, look for things that stand out and for behaviors that vary from one situation to another.
Facial expressions
Facial expressions can also be useful.
Some of these fall into the familiar “weak means strong” category. Someone making a big bet who looks uncertain, confused, or unhappy can be more likely to actually be strong.
But some of the most useful expressions are extremely brief.
You might see a split-second expression of uncertainty: someone stretching their lips as if unsure, making a slight headshake, giving a tiny shrug-like expression, or briefly furrowing their brow.
These behaviors aren’t necessarily conscious attempts at deception. People simply have natural tendencies to act in certain ways when they’re strong.
Some of these expressions can be quite subtle but also quite reliable.
Of course, you should pay attention to a player’s baseline. If someone regularly makes these expressions with both strong and weak hands, they aren’t useful for that player. But even for general cold reads, I think some of these behaviors are often strong enough to act on, on their own.
Loose, playful movements
Another valuable category is loose, playful movement.
These might also be called these “gravity-defying” behaviors.
An example would be someone making a big bet and casually flipping chips end-over-end. That kind of playful behavior is strongly associated with relaxation.
There are other upward, bouncy, loose movements that you see much less often from bluffers.
When someone has just made a big bet, watch for those little signs of physical looseness.
Overall body stillness versus movement
More generally, try to get a sense of how still and stoic someone becomes after making a big bet versus how much loose physical behavior they show.
Don’t just watch for obvious movements. Look at smaller things:
Is their chest moving noticeably as they breathe? Are their arms loose or rigid? Are their legs moving? Does their whole body seem relaxed or frozen?
Antonio Esfandiari once referred to something like this as a player’s “aura.” I don’t mean that in a mystical sense. It’s simply the overall impression you get of how loose or tense someone’s body is.
Over time, you can learn what a particular player normally looks like and compare later big-bet situations to that baseline.
Verbal hand-weakening statements
Verbal behavior is another important area.
One of the strongest categories is what I call hand-weakening statements: statements that weaken someone’s apparent hand range in some way.
These can be quite reliable from players making big bets.
The basic reason is intuitive: bluffers generally don’t want to say something that might make an opponent more likely to call them. Even joking or subtle statements that weaken their apparent range can be uncomfortable for a bluffer.
These patterns can show up in surprisingly subtle ways. If you’re going to spend time studying verbal poker tells, this is one of the areas I’d focus on most.
Focus on the highest-value behaviors
There are countless poker tells you could potentially watch for. Trying to monitor everything can actually make it harder to pay attention to what matters.
If I had to narrow things down, I would spend the most effort watching how players behave in strategically important situations—especially big-bet spots—and looking for changes in eye behavior, timing and hesitation, facial expressions, physical looseness or stillness, and verbal statements.
And whenever possible, compare those behaviors to what you’ve already seen from that specific player.
Individual behaviors are rarely definitive. But when you know which behaviors are most meaningful, and you combine them with the strategic context of the hand and what you know about the player, they can provide genuinely useful information.
The source for this information
This information comes from a video I, Zachary Elwood, made for my Reading Poker Tells Video series, which you can watch below. The part talking about the most important poker tells starts at 10:00.
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.