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Angleshooting in poker and other games refers to actions that are deemed by some players to be outside of the bounds of the rules and spirit of the game.
The following comes from an appendices in the book Verbal Poker Tells (2015), by me, Zachary Elwood:
Deception about hand strength is an accepted part of the game; verbally deceiving someone about hand strength seems to be no different than attempting to deceive someone with a bluff or with a false physical tell. Because non-cooperation is assumed in poker, it’s also assumed players will attempt to deceive opponents about hand strength.
The same is not true for deception that seems to lie outside of the behavior covered directly by the game. This “outside-of-game” behavior is more likely to be considered immoral or “angle-shooting.” A couple extreme examples of this outside-of-game deception should make us see why this is so:
A player bluffs the river while telling his opponent, “I’m going to come to your house tonight and kill you if you make this call. I’m completely serious.”
A player bluffs the river while telling his opponent, “Someone has kidnapped my children. They say I need to win this pot or my children will be killed. Please fold. I’m not kidding.”
Even though poker is a game where non-cooperation is assumed, most everyone would find these two examples morally wrong. They violate the understood boundaries of the game. They’re not deceptions about hand strength but about the external conditions of the game itself.
Even though false statements of intent (e.g., someone purposefully raising and then saying “I meant to just call”) are obviously not as serious as the previous examples, they’re on the same spectrum of behavior that could be considered more outside of the usually recognized boundaries of the game itself. Deception about the state of an action is different than deception about the motivations behind an action. There is a difference between a player who tries to deceive a player about why he raised and a player who tries to deceive a player about whether he raised at all. The outside-of-game nature of these kinds of deceptions helps explain why they’re less ethically accepted and more likely to be considered “angle-shooting.”
That’s the end of the excerpt from Verbal Poker Tells.
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.