Sit still because everyone is watching. Say nothing, do not breathe or move or speak. This is the standard primer on not giving any poker tells at the table and is, if I may say so, a little extreme. When you play poker there are a range of different things you can do to avoid giving tells. Texas Hold ‘em poker players all have a different approach to detecting tells and avoiding giving them and it is very interesting to learn the tactics players use in relation to physical tells. This article is more focused on live poker rather than online poker because when playing on your favourite poker sites you can put your head in your hands and scream for a fold if you make a bluff attempt and nobody can see you!

If you ask a none poker player to do a poker face, what do they do? They try and look unemotional and keep as still as possible. Many new players think that the key to poker is looking for tells on an opponent then exploiting them to win all of the chips. In reality it is a little more difficult and a lot different. Tells are important but it is so difficult to know whether a tell is real, genuine or just you trying to convince yourself you can see something that is not there that it plays less of a role in poker than a novice may think.

What players cannot hide is the way their hands are played. Optimal poker strategy suggests that in a certain scenario a player plays poker in a certain way and if you can detect these patterns you can put them on a hand and know how to play against them. This gives you a great advantage in a tough situation if you know how the player plays poker. The true poker tells are in hand reading and opponent profiling. Having a read on a player is knowing their tendencies and being able to predict backwards why they made the play they did. They may be twitching, poking their hair and being physically predictable but one thing that never ever lies is the way they play poker hands.

Rarely does a player deliberately play a hand badly to deceive opponents in the way they would shuffle, cough or do something else to deceive a player from knowing their physical tells. Doing things like this is quite a basic and effective way to hide any physical tells. Only a weak player deliberately loses money to give false information about that style. If only to set up a future bluff it is a risky and losing way of playing poker.

Professional players often use scare tactics to make a player feel uncomfortable. They stare down a player looking for reads in their behaviour. Daniel Negreanu says that professionals use these scare tactics to make a player think twice about making a move in future hoping they remember feeling decidedly uncomfortable during the tactical stare down. This method tries to take the less experienced player out of their comfort zone so they either play badly or reveal more about their style by either talking or revealing information through body language.

Sometimes you can be so focused on working out a player physically that you forget to watch the betting. Do they always raise pre-flop with the goods? Are they trappy or tricky? Before watching out for physical tells do your homework learning their playing tendencies through their patterns of play and player style. This is far more profitable to you than risking all of your chips re-shoving because the player touched their nose like they did when they were bluffing three hands ago. They might just have a cold!

By Malcolm Clarke

Related posts:

1. My Dream Poker Innovation Imagine playing Texas Hold’em poker in a live environment, but...
2. Are Poker Rooms Doing Enough To Stop Bots? Poker Bots are a constant problem for poker rooms who...
3. Keep Control of the Pots Pot control is the art of maintaining the size of...
4. How to Use Your Image Poker and image go hand in hand. Not only in...
5. Starting Hands in 7 Card Stud With two hole cards facing down and one face up...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.