Spotting A Poker Tell
Spotting a poker tell can be extremely advantegeous for you, but you have to make sure that your tell is in context of whats going on. Just like taking atoms, making some bonds between them to form molecules is a poker tell to a cerrtain action at the table to form an idea of how strong your opponents' hand is. There has to be a connection between the action at the table and the poker tell that was expressed. If a person has not looked at their cards, just seen the flop, or even seen someone else bet, then how can you determine that this was indeed a tell? The simple answer is that you can't. For an action to be considered a tell, there must be a cause for that action. A person must have just looked at their cards, seen a new community card, seen another bet, bet themselves, and so on and so forth. That is when you can consider an action to be a poker tell for you to use later on. There must be a cause for the reaction or action. Remember that.
You didn't come here to read something that simple did you? You want the hard scoop of what you need to do to find those elusive poker tells. Read on and I'll give you a routine to start to go by to find those poker tells.
Now you have the basis of what you need to know to decipher what a real poker tell is. Time to start collecting information.
When you are first walking to the poker table, make a note of how everyone has their chips stacked. This will give you an idea of how that person plays. Usually the sloppier the stack, the looser the player. Think about it for a moment. If your always throwing chips out into the pot, stacking your chips properly every hand becomes too time consuming. They want to grab and go. This will give an idea of how often a person will tend to bluff. Take note that there are just lazy people out there as well, but you'll know the difference.
As your sitting there at the poker table, you should start to make notes of how everyone is sitting while they are NOT in a hand. Pay attention to their mannerisms and body language. You do this at this time to get a baseline of how everyone is before they start to play a hand. If you do not do this, your chances of picking a vaiable tell is severly deminished. You have to have something to compare to so that you can notice a change in a persons' behavior. Without this knowledge, how can you decipher a change in someones behavior from what they are just normally at the table?
After you have set a baseline for a player, you can now start to observe them while they are playing hands. The key here is to observe your opponents while not actually staring them down. If you continuously stare at an opponent and they notice you doing this, their reactions will change and they will try harder to conceal their tells. Their sub-concious tells will lessen to a degree and make it even harder for you to get a definite tell. Lets put this into perspective. When you notice someone watching you, say someone of the opposite sex, do you not change how your sitting, standing, looking. You might even puff out your chest or suck in that gut depending on who you are, but you see that you change how you are responding. Your reactions have changed now that you have noticed someone paying attention to you. The same happens at the poker table. A person will change how they are reacting if they notice you. Sunglasses are great for this. With sunglasses on, no one can tell where your looking or how your eyes are reacting to changing conditions at the table.
The steps are coming to an end as the last thing to do is to spot those poker tells. Be looking for anything that is not following a persons' baseline you have set for them. Eye twitching, lip movement, breathing, happy feet are all signs of strong or weak hand strength. Now its just up to you to recognize what each one means and use that against them.
From me to you, I wish you the best of luck…………….just not against me.
