Poker Tropical

There has always been a difficulty for me in attaching much importance to physical tells in live poker, as I used to use them to try and appear nervous when I was strong with some success against certain players a few years back.

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Many players will tell you that physical tells are important however, but you can certainly say they are overstated in the general idea of poker for those who have never played it. The poker film ‘Rounders’ famously talks about knowing a mans tell and how much this can help you in the game, and having watched this film last night before a poker tournament, I began to look upon the idea in a new light. The problem with looking for tells in players is that most of the poker players you sit down against are experienced, and will go to great lengths to give nothing away when they bet. This does not go for every poker player however, and one less experienced player last night proved something.

Some poker players have tells which are blindingly obvious, but you simply wouldn’t notice unless you were looking for the correlation between a particular action, and the hand they turn over at the end. Down to four players and with our less experienced poker player on my left, I realised that whenever I started picking up chips to raise his big blind, he picked up some of his chips and started playing with them. Three times I took his big blind in this way, until on the fourth time, when I picked up chips to make a raise…. He sat perfectly still with his arms folded. I then folded, he raised the pot and ended up showing (A,K) at the end of the hand. So having previously written about physical tells being overrated, I felt it necessary to point this out. Whilst you might sit down at several poker tables and not see any tells from poker players, but keep looking, because you are bound to find one eventually.