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A slide from my Reading Poker Tells Video series
Eye-related behaviors and patterns are arguably one of the most important categories of poker tells. But it is hard to talk about this area in a quick and easy way as there are so many factors. For example, the nature of the situation plays a big role; there is a big difference between someone waiting to act and someone making a big bet. But here are some of the major patterns:
- In general, a player making a significant bet who makes a good amount of eye contact with an opponent will be relaxed and have a strong hand. This can vary, of course, and one should always seek to get player-specific information before acting on a read, but this is the general trend.
- For players who are waiting to act, eye contact is more associated with vulnerability and weaker hands.
- For players making significant bets: much more important than eye contact is the quality of their eye movements. More loose, dynamic, and unrestrained-seeming eye movements will be associated with stronger hands, while more static, still, and tense eye movements will be more associated with weaker hands.
Note that, as with all tells, more loose and unrestrained behavior is more meaningful than stoic and still behavior. In other words, someone’s eye movements being loose and dynamic is much more meaningful information than someone’s eye movements being stoic and still, simply because, overall, stoicness and stillness are the typical traits for most players in most spots. It’s largely the deviations from the typical stoic and still and neutral poker player baselines that will be most meaningful.
To help explain these points about eye contact and eye movements, I’ll include some excerpts from my poker tells books below.
The following is from my first book Reading Poker Tells:
Eye contact
This is the major area of difference between waiting-for-action fear and post-bet fear. This is due to the waiting-for-action fear being the fear of a threat, while the post-bet fear is more fear of exposure. The difference between these two types of behavior is the reason eye contact can be such an important tell. Here is how the two types of fear can manifest in a player’s amount of eye contact:
An image from my 2012 book Reading Poker Tells
Waiting-for-action eye contact: A person who is afraid of someone (like a poker player with a weak hand who is worried that his opponent will bet) will tend to watch the other person carefully. The anxious person will keep their full attention on the potential threat as much as they can (as long as watching the other person will not increase the threat, as in the case of staring at a threatening person on the street).
Keeping an eye on the potentially threatening person prevents the possibility of being attacked out-of-the-blue. It can also serve another purpose: it can let the potentially dangerous person know that they are being watched and that they should also be on their guard.
A relaxed person who doesn’t feel threatened (like a player with a strong hand who is waiting for his opponent to act) won’t feel as compelled to watch the other person. His gaze is more likely to be unconcerned and unstressed. If he has the upper hand in a competitive situation, he may actually avoid eye contact with a competitor because he doesn’t want to intimidate the other person.
Post-bet eye contact: People who are afraid of being exposed (e.g., bluffers) will tend to make eye contact less than people who are relaxed. Making eye contact may be uncomfortable for them because they are afraid their fear will be sensed by others and their secret will be discovered. They would prefer to not look at the people who study them.
Relaxed people (like players with strong hands) are more capable of looking at the people around them with a loose, spontaneous gaze. Their thoughts aren’t on how they’re perceived or who they’re looking at. They don’t care if they make eye contact with people who are observing them, because it doesn’t much affect them.
This basic stress-related behavior informs many of the specific tells I will describe in the next sections.
You should always keep in mind that experienced poker players will have overcome many of the more instinctual emotional habits that mediocre players tend to have. When playing with players you know are experienced, you should be less likely to believe any emotion-based tells.
The following comes from a script of a video in my Reading Poker Tells Video series. It goes into more detail about the complexity of eye contact from bettors, and why people wrongly believe that staring from a bettor tends to mean bluffing.
Eye contact when betting
Bet-related eye contact is probably one of the most important poker tells to look for. It’s something I’m always studying when I play. When I see players involved in decent-sized pots, I’m always watching what they’re doing with their eyes during and after betting, looking for patterns.
And I’ve simplified things so far in this video. Eye contact behavior is pretty complex and there are many types of patterns people might have. I’ve just told you the pattern I think is the most common one. But it’s a pretty complex area. Let’s take a look at two of the major patterns, which are essentially opposite of each other.
The first pattern goes as follows:
- Players betting strong hands will tend to look more at opponents, due to being relaxed. These same players, if they’re betting weak hands or bluffs, will tend to avoid eye contact due to being nervous and not wanting to interact with an opponent.
This is the pattern I think that applies to most recreational players and most players in general. Most players are just so nervous when making a significant bluff that they’re not comfortable wanting to interact in any way with an opponent. They’re too afraid of being studied and accidentally triggering an opponent’s calling reflex. This is the pattern I assume most recreational players fall into, and then it’s just a matter of trying to see if the pattern holds true over time.
Let’s look at the second, opposite pattern:
- Players betting weak hands and bluffs will stare more at their opponents, in order to represent strength and confidence. These same players, when they’re betting strong hands, will avoid eye contact, because they want to seem more meek and uncertain.
Notice that even though the behaviors are completely opposite, it’s still possible to understand the psychological reasons that might be explaining the behaviors.
Now, looking at all these possible feelings that can underlie behavior and possibly be overlapping, it’s obvious it can be a very complex behavior to try to study. There will be a lot of variety and I’m not pretending otherwise. There will be some players who will be all over the place with this behavior and have a lot of variety, and those players will be hard to read for that reason. And then there’ll be players who are very consistent with their behavior; for example, after making a big bet they always stare at the table or stare at their opponent. And those players will also be hard to read. But the point is that patterns are possible and many players have them. Thinking about the two patterns I’ve described will make it easier to look for and notice those patterns if they’re there.
The first thing that can clue you into finding a pattern is finding variety in someone’s behavior. For example, you watch an opponent in a few hands, and notice that he’s sometimes staring at an opponent after making a big river bet and another time he made a big river bet and stared at the table. Once you find variety in behavior, that’s a sign that you should study it some more to see if you can find a pattern. Most of the time it’ll be hard to find a pattern, but for some players it can quickly become apparent that there is a pattern.
An image from Mike Caro’s Book of Tells, which I think is the source of the faulty idea that bluffers are likely to stare at opponents.
There’s a lot of misconception out there about eye contact and bluffing. Many people are under the impression that the second pattern I described is more common; that it’s more likely that bluffers will try to stare you down. But, as I’ve said, that’s fairly uncommon, and this mistaken idea is probably responsible for a lot of lost money.
You actually see this idea repeated a lot in mainstream content about poker tells. I think it stems from this part of Mike Caro’s Book of Tells, that says that players staring at you are less of a threat than players who are looking away from you. But Caro was actually talking about players who are waiting-to-act, not bettors. Nowhere in his book does he say that bluffers will stare you down; it seems that people have just applied his general strong-means-weak rules to all situations.
The following excerpt comes from Reading Poker Tells and discusses the other major aspect of eye-related poker tells: the restrained-versus-unrestrained nature of someone’s eye movements. This idea is covered in more detail in my later books and videos (for example, my book Exploiting Poker Tells has several hand histories involving acting on eye-related behaviors) but this is a good introduction to the idea.
Relaxed eyes
How relaxed a player’s eyes are can sometimes reveal how relaxed he is.
A slide from my Reading Poker Tells Video series
As has been said a few times, many players, when holding a weak hand and waiting for their opponent to act, will stare at their opponent. But some players will make a consistent effort to look at their opponent, no matter how strong or weak their hand is. Is there a way to read these players? There’s one major way that players in this situation can give away information, and it involves how relaxed their eyes are.
Let’s say you’re in a no-limit Hold’em game, and you’re heads up on the turn with a decent player. You’ve raised pre-flop and bet the flop. All you’ve got is AQ for over-cards. Now the turn comes; a K, which is a blank for you but possibly a good scare card.
As you contemplate a bet, your opponent stares at you intently. He often stares at you in these spots. The first few times you played with him, you didn’t think there was any information to be had from him in these situations, because he was so consistent in his actions. But there have been a couple times lately when you’ve been able to correlate a certain relaxation of his eyes with better-than-average strength. You look at him now and notice that his eyes are kind of at half-mast. You think back to when you’ve seen him waiting for you to act when he had a weak hand and didn’t want you to bet; his eyes in that situation were more wide, more alert.
Thinking about all of this, you decide to check to him instead. He makes a decent bet and you fold. You offer him ten bucks to see his hand. He obliges, showing the KQ for top pair on the turn. You add this information to your mental database.
The primary thing to notice about someone’s eyes is usually the eyelids and how exposed the whites of the eyes. Tension and anxiety tend to make a person’s eyes open more than when that person is relaxed. The eyes of someone who’s relaxed will tend to be more closed, with less eyeball exposed. (This is also true of some animals. Cats supposedly communicate friendship to other cats by looking at each other and slowly lowering their eyelids. Doing this indicates that they are comfortable and don’t pose a threat.)
The speed of eye movement is another thing to correlate. A relaxed opponent is more likely to have eyes that move around freely, because his general relaxed body language also applies to his eye muscles. An anxious opponent, as we know, is generally more tensed up and still, and this behavior often applies to a player’s eyes. An anxious opponent may have a more frozen, self-conscious gaze, with more control over his eye movements. This kind of thing can be very subtle and is admittedly hard to spot.
You also might study their blinking tendencies. Some relaxed opponents will tend to blink more; some will tend to blink less. In my experience, reduced blinking is more likely to mean someone with a weak hand and increased blinking is more likely to mean a strong hand. (Increased blinking has been linked with lying in some studies, but in my opinion studies having to do with lying and interrogation are often very unrelated to how poker players behave, just because the motivations and emotions involved are so different.)
A relaxed person can behave many different ways, because they are relaxed and not worried about how they appear. For example, their eyes might move around more when they’re relaxed, but then again they might not. Their eyes might blink more, but they might not. Being relaxed includes a larger set of behaviors than does being anxious, because being relaxed allows for more room to behave different ways, whereas being anxious usually results in narrowing a set of behaviors to a smaller range.
The main thing you’ll need to do (as with most situations) is to compare how the opponent stares at you in this waiting-for-action situation when he’s weak compared to when he’s strong. You may notice that when he’s weak, his eyes don’t swivel around as loosely as when he’s strong, or that he doesn’t blink much, or that his eyes get slightly wider. Then you need to compare that information to the next time you’re in the same spot with him, and maybe you’ll notice a difference. Or if you don’t notice a difference, you will stop looking for that tell and focus on other things.
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.