Pokerwiner.com → Within poker principles
Now consider that if our expert could triple the number of tells he spots, he would earn $7.89 per hour (or $5.26 more than before ) as a result of tells, increasing his hourly rate to about $25 per hour. While that’s not an astronomical increase it is a noteworthy percentage increase for this poker player. But the big question is whether there is any way a player could acquire the ability to identify several times more tells than the average expert at a given limit.
The answer is a qualified “maybe, but don’t hold your breath.” My experience does suggest that there are many tells which are easy to overlook. To support this contention I will first describe a routine hand I played, which involved detecting a simple tell. As you will see, this “tell” was of such an unremarkable nature that some players might not even behavior which betrays something about an opponent ‘s hand, then this example is a tell. Its importance, however, is in what it may suggest about the potential to detect other tells which, for most of us, go by unnoticed. In this hand I had opened for a raise in a $20- $40 game, in a late middle position, holding
Only the big blind hookey called. I had seen her play for only about an hour, but it was enough to know that she played weakly and could have nearly anything.
Perhaps only a complete garbage hand could be tentatively ruled out. The flop came
My opponent checked and called my bet. I could not do much to narrow down her hand. She could have certainly had top or middle pair, or could be on a straight draw. The turn was the
and had the same action. The river was the
Again the checked. There was no flush threat, but I had to wonder about a straight or two pair. She had been calling with something. Was there a chance she had slowplayed a 9-7 on the turn? Had she made a gut shot with 7-4, or some kind of two poker pair on the river? Though I had not seen her play enough to know if she had any tendency to check-raise, I knew that if she had a straight that would almost certainly be her action. Unless I had reason to suspect the straight, I wanted to bet for value. Though she could be timidly checking two pair, I believed that she would call me down with any pair, making the value bet a profitable play.
Now, there are occasions when you can pick up a sign that an opponent is planning to check-raise. (If you observe, you will find that sometimes even good players do act in some subtly different ways when their check precedes a raise versus those times it does not. Of course it is also common for unsophisticated players to put on an act and pretend they’re thinking about betting). But in this instance I though there was evidence that she was not going to raise if I bet. As observed her check, her action struck me as very genuinely devoid of any ulterior motive. I suppose I saw a sort of unstudied casualness in the way she checked and waited for me to act.
Also, I knew that this was an unsophisticated opponent, and therefore guessed that were she to plan a check-raise, she would likely make a more noticeable effort to convince me that she did not have a hand and was not going to raise. It turned out that I was right and was able to collect another bet in the poker hand.(Had her action been neutral and unreadable, I still probably would have bet; the tell simply allowed me to do so more confidently ).
Playing Too Many Hands-I / Playing Too Many Hands-II
Bad Plays Good Players make / Self-Weighting Cold Calls
Do You Pass the Ace-Queen Test /
Conjecture on the Limits of Tell Detectability
Quick Indicators / Afterthought