Tells
After you’ve mastered the basics of playing poker, it’s time to step it up a notch!
You’ve got to start ‘reading’ your opponents. Reading is the most profitable skill of the game because it allows you to ‘put someone on a hand’, or ‘take them off a hand’.
Putting someone on a hand means that you have found a reason to believe a player has a a certain hand. Or you can take someone off a hand, meaning you have reason to believe he doesn’t have a specific hand.
It’s just as if your opponent would ‘tell’ you what his hand is, and I don’t need to explain the benefit to that, now do I?
So you’re wondering why anyone would be so stupid to tell you what hand he has. Well, that’s because he doesn’t know he’s telling you.
It’s in small things.
Some players don’t even know they’re being studied. These are the easy ones. But this type of player is kind of rare. Most poker players want to be good and do try to cover up their behaviour. Even worse, some players go out of their ways to disguise their handstrength. These are a bit more difficult, but logical reasoning will still get you there.
Here is the most important principle to remember when you try to figure out a player who does try to conseal his handstrength.
Strong means weak, and weak means strong.
It’s a sort of an automated response to try and cover up his hand strength by acting the opposite way of wat he really wants you to do.
What I mean is this; if he want’s you to call, he’ll try to make you think he’s got a poor hand. And if he want’s you to fold, he’ll try to make you believe he’s strong. But don’t fall for it! It’s an act! And you have to react the opposite way. It’s kind of logical I guess, but you do have to pick up on these tells and interpret them correctly.
And interpreting your opponents behaviour might be the most difficult part, because you don’t know if he’s acting or not. By acting I mean if he’s delibirately trying to confuse you, or just unaware about his behaviour.
Tells are difficult, but so important, so you better master this skill.
Of course it’s not just one trick you have to learn, and then you’re able to read players. There are many subtile hints every once in a while. You won’t be able to use one type of read all night long, more like once a night. But it may just give you that one hint not to go all-in, and be worth a couple of hundred, or maybe even thousands of euro’s.
If you want to learn more specific tells to look out for, just keep updated on the BestPokerTips-section regulary!
