Giving and Using Information About Hands

Some Thoughts on Not Giving Away Information About Your Hand
You should work very hard to avoid giving your opponents any reliable information about the exact nature of your hand. There are several ways to do this. One of the most obvious ways is to try not to give out any information at all. Players attempt to avoid giving out information in a variety of ways. One simple way is not to look at your holecards until it is your turn to act. If you don’t know what you have, you can’t give anything away. Some players are quite capable of looking at their cards without giving anything away, but others are not. They may look bored and prepare to fold with 7-2 offsuit, but become intensely focused on the action when they have A-K. Others may attempt to trick opponents by looking bored with aces. This might work once or twice, but as soon as some of their opponents notice their tendencies, they’ll be giving away a lot more information than if they had done nothing. You may see tournament players who refuse to answer questions or even cover themselves with a hood to avoid giving anything away. My own feeling is that if you can’t answer a simple question like, “How deep are you?” (which means, how big is your stack?) without giving something away, you probably should not be playing live poker. Just play online. There, the server will maintain an absolutely constant, neutral expression. I suppose that someone is about to tell me that you can change the expressions on your avatars on Full Tilt, but why would you ever do it in the middle of a hand?

Another important way to avoid giving away information is to try to do the same thing in the same situation all the time. If you are playing deep-stack poker and decide to raise from under the gun, you should always use the same formula, such as two and a half times the big blind. Whatever formula you choose, stick to it every time you raise. Raise the same amount with aces that you do with J-10 suited. This way, the amount of your raise won’t give anything away. (The main exception to this occurs late in tournaments when you have a short stack. Then, your formula changes to moving all in. But again, this short-stack formula should be followed whether you have a big hand or nothing.)

Some Thoughts on Making Use of Information That Your Opponents Give Away
In some ways, this is the opposite of not giving away information about your hand. Here, you want to uncover as much as you can about your opponents’ hands, and make the best use of this information. There are two principal ways of uncovering information about your opponents’ hands. The first is learning their patterns and what their patterns mean. If your opponent never reraises an early-position raiser without aces, kings, or A-K, you have a very specific idea of what he has when he reraises. The second is detecting tells. A tell is some physical or verbal mannerism or pattern that reveals the nature of a player’s hand. The topics of uncovering patterns and detecting tells are extremely vast. Each of these subjects deserves a series of columns, and I won’t attempt to go into them here. What I do want to discuss is how to make use of the information that is revealed to you. For the purpose of this discussion, let’s assume that your opponent bets on the river and you have discovered that he is bluffing.

Your first impulse might be to call quickly, and get the hand over with. While this might intimidate both this opponent and others, it is usually not the right thing to do. If the bluffer is a regular opponent in a live game, you may decide to let him “get away” with his bluff if the pot is small. This will cause him to become more confident about his ability to bluff you, and you can then call his big bluffs in big pots later on. Avoid scaring him away now, when the pot is small.

In general, these occasions of letting a bluff succeed are rare, and you want to call your opponent most of the time. How should you call? That depends on what you want and how well you can read your opponent. If you want him to stop bluffing, or at least bluff less often, because you can seldom read him very well, call quickly. Beating him into the pot may make him think twice about bluffing you later in the session. On the other hand, if he is someone you can read well, you don’t want to discourage his bluffs. Even if you are immediately convinced that it is right to call, take your time. It is never a bad policy to take a little extra time before committing a lot of chips to the pot. Review what has happened, and make sure that you are making the correct decision. In this case, your hesitation serves another purpose, as well. It may convince your opponent that you have trouble reading him, so he will continue to try to bluff you in the future. While you are thinking, some opponents will begin expecting you to fold. They will already be counting their pot. It will be a real shock to them when you make a successful call, and this may even put them on tilt (cause them to play very poorly) for a while.

Steve “Zee” Zolotow, aka The Bald Eagle, is a successful games player. He currently devotes most of his time to poker. He can be found at many major tournaments and playing on Full Tilt, as one of its pros. When escaping from poker, he hangs out in his bars on Avenue A — Nice Guy Eddie’s at Houston and Doc Holliday’s at 9th Street — in New York City.