Tells

Tells are an almost passé tool in poker. Back when Mike Caro first came around and released his Book of Tells they were huge. I read that book and probably still have it somewhere. There was definitely some useful stuff in there. In fact, I still use some. For instance, when I first show up at a table, especially in a tournament, it helps to look at everyone’s chips and see how they have them stacked. If they’re messy, the player is probably loose, neat they’re probably tight and if they have them lined up by the side markings, they’re probably an obsessive-compulsive nit. The problem with Mr. Caro’s book, though he probably wouldn’t see it as one, is that so many people have read it. They know so many of the things that are in the book that many of them are no longer reliable.

After Mike Caro, there was a long lull in tell experts. Then, we heard of a former FBI agent and counterintelligence specialist named Joe Navarro. He burst on the poker scene with tips straight out of the FBI on how to read your opponents’ body language and use that to your advantage. This is some heavy duty stuff. The tips and tricks he used to catch bad guys are now being used in a poker game to make money. Very cool. I was impressed by his pedigree and his ability to convey the information he had gathered over years of studying people during interrogations. It’s a very smart transition. While not life and death, a poker table is similar to an interrogation because people are uncomfortable when money is at stake. When people are uncomfortable, they are usually easier to read. If we can study these reactions and turn a close fold into a clear call or vice versa, that adds to our bottom line. Even so, I missed the boat on his courses because I was jaded about tells and thought that there wasn’t much he could teach me that I wasn’t already using or that tells just weren’t worth that much anyways, etcetera. You can always get into trouble when you start thinking that someone can’t teach you something, especially someone with loads of experience.

Fast forward to today and I’ve come around a bit on tells. I still think that they shouldn’t be the only factor in making a decision, but they have become a bigger part of my game thanks to one person. I was recently down in the Dallas area doing a quick two day seminar on tournaments at Big Slick Poker Academy. They have a great facility there that was very conducive to teaching and at the end of the class, the students played a sit-n-go that I commentated. It was a slick final table set up with RFID (radio-frequency identification) technology and lots of cameras and mics. It looked very good. Anyways, during the seminar, Sean, the head instructor at Big Slick, introduced the class, myself included, to some very good info on tells. He had video of some players on his final table set up exhibiting some very easy to spot and reliable tells. It opened my eyes and I’m going to try to be in town the next time he’s doing a seminar on tells to get more information since he only spoke on the subject for roughly half an hour.

I was playing just a couple days later in a cash game and I used the information against one of my opponents and it worked out. Of course, a little bit of information can often be dangerous and I’m not sure I’ve got it nailed down just yet but I do remember one hand where I used an unconscious tell against a well-known poker player to pick up some chips uncontested. We were playing a tournament at the Bike in LA and it was early in the day.

I was watching this person when he first looked at his hand and I noticed a quick tell that made me think his hand was pretty marginal. He then took longer than usual to make his decision about whether he was going to play the hand. He settled on raising and there was one flat caller in the middle. I used all three of these bits of information, the physical tell, the timing tell, and the leverage of the person who flat called to decide that I was going to raise no matter what two cards I had. There have been times when I’ve decided something like this in the past and it got to me and I didn’t pull the trigger because my hand was so bad, but the confidence I was given based on the tells I picked up made it easy for me to three-bet with a very poor hand, J-6 offsuit. The three-bet got through and I won a decent amount of chips uncontested.

I think the main thing that I took from this little segment on tells was that no matter who you’re playing with, they’ll give off some information through physical tells.Of course, the more experienced the player is, the more likely it is that you’re receiving little information or false information but, as always, the information we gather at the poker table has little value without context and if we can figure out the correct context from the information we receive from tells, it can be worth quite a bit. Study up, pay attention, and bring in some extra money. ♠

Gavin Griffin was the first poker player to capture a World Series of Poker, European Poker Tour and World Poker Tour title and has amassed nearly $5 million in lifetime tournament winnings. Griffin is sponsored by HeroPoker.com. You can follow him on Twitter @NHGG