Today I want to talk about the poker tell.  What is it exactly?

Wikipedia says it is a subtle but detectable change in a poker player’s behavior, that gives clues to their hand.  Ok that’s all very well but what do I look for and how do I know its a tell?

From my experience its all about body language, you have to become very observant of people’s behavior.   One way of doing this is to examine them whilst they are at various stages of play and ask the following questions:

Are they fidgeting?   What is the tone of their voice?  What are their facial expressions?  How are they breathing?

What are their hands doing?  What are they doing with their chips?   How do they place their chips?

Not only the chips, what about their cards, are they fiddling with them?  Or their cigarettes, drink or jewelery.

One good sign is to observe how your opponent is sitting.  Are they sitting forward or leaning back?

Then you have to look for patterns of play, so what are they doing whilst they think they have a winning hand and how do they usually bet?

You don’t need a degree in psychology but it does help to read up on people’s behavior so that you can work out some poker tells.  The following variations of behavioural patterns are guidelines, all people are different and there is no hard and fast rule:

- sometimes people behave aggressively or strongly to cover up when they actually have a weak hand, almost to over compensate.
- or the opposite, when they have a good poker hand, they will try and play it down by acting passively and not making eye contact.
- look for signs of adrenalin, a flush face, blood rush or a stronger hand shake, could be due to excitement.
- if players have a good hand they may cover the cards to protect them.

Poker tells is a complex subject, there are many variations of behavior and I could go on for ages.  In fact Mike Caro has written a good book on poker tells called “Mike Caro’s Book of Tells” if you want to know more about the subject.

Be careful of falling for traps where players are trying a false tell, to lead you into a trap or to do something without thinking it through properly.  Over time you will get a feel for what people generally do, but then there are always the exceptions!