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CONJECTURE ON THE LIMITS OF TELL DETECTABILITY
Reading tells is fun. Spotting a useful tell in an opponent’s behavior and making profitable use of your discovery engenders a secret little sense of victory.
It is not entirely clear, however, just how profitable reading tells can be. Mike Caro and Mason Malmuth have debated this point in the poker literature, with Caro asserting that reading tells can provide a major portion of a good player’s income, and Malmuth countering that it accounts for only about $2 per hour for an expert in a $20- $40 game (See “The Value of Tells and Positive Reinforcement ” in Poker Essays, Volume II).
My own opinion has been similar to Malmuth’s I have long believed that tells, account for far less profit than such factors as correct strategy and conventional hand reading. Yet most of us do have room for improvement in our ability to identify tells. My purpose in this essay is to examine what might be possible as we approach our limits in this ability. Mike Caro is the author of the major reference on tells, The Body Language of Poker: Mike Caro’s Book of Tells. In it he focuses on common tells, exhibited by relatively many players. The tells he describes certainly occur in lots of games, but are more common in the small limits. At the middle limits, where you will find many more decent players, obvious tells such as those involving acting weak when strong, or a player’s hand shaking when he holds a monster hand, do not occur as frequently.
You do see them, but I do not believe that it is often enough to have a tremendous impact on your hourly rate. Somewhat more frequent are tells such as a player double checking his hole cards or giving away information by beginning to act out of turn. In addition, I have sometimes been able to spot tells of the more individualized sort. These are the inadvertent mannerisms, movements, and the like, with which some players give away the strength of their hand. Caro mentions only a few of these in his work, perhaps because they often involve the idiosyncrasies of individual players, and so cannot be discussed in general terms. You may find such a tell in one person’s play, but see it in no one else’s over years at the tables. Such tells are thus difficult to find because you don’t know ahead of time what you are looking for. It may be a twitch, a posture, a laugh, a distinct betting motion, or any of countless other possibilities.
HIDDEN POTENTIAL IN SUBTLE TELLSU
Nevertheless, I believe there may be some untapped potential in this area of tells. To illustrate what could conceivably be possible let us consider a very good $10 – $20 holdem player who earns $20 per hour. Let us also assume that he is average (among expert players) in his ability to read tells. Now, just to provide a starting point let’s do a very simplistic analysis of what tells contribute to his “earn.” In the absence of formal research on this topic, let’s just estimate that he identifies and profits from one tell for every seven hours of play. (Some readers will think this sounds like a player who spots few tells. But note that I am crediting those tells with earning whole bets and pots rather than the fractions of bets and pots that could be attributed to them in reality. Thus, this should more than compensate for the reduction in earn created by assuming relatively infrequent detection of tells ).
On a given occasion a tell may help him win a bet, save a bet, or win the pot. Rather arbitrarily, I’ll say that every 25th tell wins him the whole pot. (Again, in reality it would be more accurate to say that some larger percentage of tells he spots contribute to his winning the whole pot, but that would take us into an analysis more complex than is necessary for our purposes here ). Furthermore, I’ll say the average pot he then wins consists of 10 betting units ($100 in a $10- $20 online poker game). Finally, I’ll say that half the bets he wins or saves by way of the other 24 out of 25 tells are $10 bets and half are $20 bets. Thus, taking $15 as the average bet won or saved by a tell, we see that for 25 tells he earns $460.
$46- = (24*$15) + $100
Since each of the 25 tells involves seven hours of play for a total of 175 hours, we divide 460 by 175 to arrive at $2.63 per hour that tells earn this player.
$2.63 = $460 / 175
(This is a little higher than Malmuth’s figure, but note that he actually allowed for a small range, depending, for example, on how much a player relies on tells versus card game reading, which will often lead to same decision ).
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