You squint in the glare from your giant stack of chips. The dealer slides cards across the table, but you’re not in a hurry to look. Instead, you’re staring intently at your opponent on the button.
They look at their cards, letting out a short but distinct sharp inhale. You see their pupils contract slightly as they glance at their hole cards, then they look straight to their chip stack before raising to 4x the blinds.. You glance at your cards – not good enough.
You fold your big blind. The player on the button has told you everything you need to know.
Poker is a game of incomplete information. You make the wisest decision you can with the information you have available to you. This means that being able to deduce hidden information from available information can lead to a huge advantage at the tables.
This leads us to one of the pillars of poker skill, but often the most misunderstood and misused concept in the game – reading opponents.
Poker Tells
In the heat of a game, reactions or behaviors taken by a player can potentially reveal information about their hand or mindset to other players. When a person’s subconscious behaviors give away the information they are trying to keep hidden, we refer to that as a tell.
Reading tells is about deducing hidden information from information that you already know. Very often it is also about deciding what assumptions about human behavior are likely versus possible. Nothing is ever a sure thing in an incomplete information game, but hints at someone’s likely attitude towards their cards can let you make a more informed decision when the action is on you.
Let’s say that your opponent has pushed a large bet into the pot and sits back from the table, letting out a deeply relieved sigh. This player has sent a clear signal – they aren’t engaged. The stressful time during the hand was making that bet, and now they don’t feel the need to watch intently as players decide whether to call, fold or raise.
This player’s behavior indicates that they think they have the best cards. The bet is placed, they don’t have anything to worry about. Don’t jump to conclusions too fast though! Is this typical behavior for that player? Are they feigning confidence in the hand to cover up that they don’t have absolute rags? Probably the latter. Players have a tendency to try and appear strong when they are really weak.
Tells that speak the truth are usually more subtle… like an attitude boiling over in slight, subconscious actions. It’s important to note, however, that tells are not an exact science – humans are individuals and will often react differently to the same stimuli.
Yes, brow sweat can be a sign of a sudden loss of confidence… but it can also mean that it’s just hot in that room. Or maybe that guy is particularly sweaty when he’s hungry and his tummy just rumbled. Everyone is different, and actually trusting a tell from any player requires some degree of baseline reference for their behavior. You have to watch and understand your opponent before their tells are valuable to you. If you haven’t noticed throughout life, people are quite complicated.
It’s also incredibly important to note that tells cannot change cards. Knowing a tell only changes the way that you perceive the action of the game and informs your decision based on your cards.
Recommended Reading: Mike Caro’s Book of Poker Tells
This poker classic is basically considered required reading for people who want to play live games. It predates online play, but there’s applications for the psychology of online players as well.
Caro walks you through the basic psychology of poker tells and assumptions about how behavior indicates attitude to their hand.
Knowing that a player thinks they have good or bad cards doesn’t inform you exactly what their cards are or make the result of the hand any different. It simply gives you more information so that you can make wise decisions regarding your own cards within the hand.
Online Poker Tells
It’s easy to assume that tells are only something that plays into live games, but that’s not exactly true. You may not be able to see your opponent’s body language playing online, but you can definitely still deduce information from their behavior.
Think about what information you do get from opponents in online games. Most obviously, you get betting amounts. At the speed online poker moves, this is actually incredibly useful information. In a lot of ways this kind of data can be more reliable than physical poker tells.
Say you have an opponent you’ve been at a table with for an hour. You’ve played dozens of hands against them and have noticed some patterns. They like to raise 3x the big blind in bad position and 4x the big blind in good position, and they very rarely limp in unless they are on the button. They tend to fold low draws pre-flop you’d guess, because you never see them get caught chasing.
One hand, you notice them uncharacteristically limp in from good position. Once there’s a 5x raise back to them they fold. A likely assumption to be made from this based on their typical behavior is that they had a high suited straight draw. J/10 suited maybe? Q/K suited? It’s unlikely they would have backed down so easily if they had the nut straight draw at A/K, so you can deduce 3-5 likely hands that they had from this behavior.
That didn’t give you much advantage at the time because they folded. You do, however, understand more about that player’s behavior. Maybe that will let you dodge a disaster when they limp in next time and catch a J/10/10 on the flop?
Minor Information, Major Advantage
In an incomplete information game like poker, little bits of information and likely assumptions can add up to a big edge at the table.
Let’s imagine that you have an opponent who you haven’t quite gotten a read on. They’ve been hanging on calling several times and haven’t yet raised or bet themselves. The flop comes 5/9/Q with suits scattered. They keep calling and playing very passively.
The turn comes a J. Suddenly, the player is much more engaged in the hand and responds to your bet with an instant raise – previously they had been considering each check carefully for several seconds. When you call their raise, the river comes a second Q. You check to the raiser, and they hammer a massive bet at you.
So what do they have? From their behavior, there’s one rather likely situation – they carried a 10/K into the flop. This explains why they wanted to hang around for as cheap as possible until their J dropped on the turn. They still had a live draw and an over card. Since the table draw is a gutshot, they know that they have drawn to the nut straight, and they’re hoping that they caught someone with the lower straight draw.
This is definitely not a sure thing. They could potentially have a busted gutshot draw with a 6/7 or something, and they’ve chosen to pretend that they have the nut straight to scare you off. Most people aren’t brilliant actors under pressure, however, so deciding whether they are trying to mislead you is a far simpler proposition than attempting to guess their random cards offhand.
One more thing about this example – they’ve been representing hitting the nut straight. You can put that hypothesis to the test! A second queen dropped on the river. If they have hit the nut straight, they’ll know that someone who had two pair going into the river – queens over X – will just have hit a full house on the river. That beats their straight.
If you come back over the top and they falter, that’s more evidence that they were on that straight draw. You may even be able to represent a late full house aggressively and scare them away altogether even.
Thinking Strategy
Like anything in poker, there’s a difference between understanding tells and applying tells. It takes practice to make the observations necessary to draw valuable information from tells, and even more practice to establish the discipline to know when and when not to act on likely assumptions about another player’s behavior.
Start to put your skills to the test. As you watch the behaviors of your opponents you’ll get better and better at it. You don’t need a poker club or casino to go to… you can start working on playing off of player behavior on Sweep It Poker today for free! See how your opponents react to different situations, and start to think about why when their behavior changes.
Stay tuned for more deep dives. Keep practicing your ability to read people as you’re out there thinking poker!
