General Guidelines for Reading Tells

See also

  1. High-confidence tells are normally displayed by players who believe they have strong hands. Low-confidence tells are normally displayed by players who believe they have weak hands.
  2. Not all tells at the table are related to poker.
  3. Try to establish baseline behaviors for the players at your table. You need to note how your opponents normally sit, their standard posture, where they place their hands, and their normal speaking behavior. That way you can determine when they deviate from their standard behaviors. For instance, if a person's hands shake when she looks at his cards or reaches for her chips, this is a high-confidence tell, an indication that player holds good cards. But if the player has natural hand tremors, this information will be useless. How do you know if this is the case? You need to get a baseline reading on the player's normal hand movements. One player was a habitual gum chewer. Every time he had a good hand, he would chew more rapidly. It was a powerful tell, but only to the observer who had noticed the habit, taken a baseline reading on the normal chewing rate, and was then in a position to notice the accelerated chewing rhythm when it occurred.
  4. Seek collaborating evidence whenever possible. Because a person often responds to specific poker situations with multiple tells, you can always be more confident of your read if you can identify additional tells that are consistent with the one you have detected. If a player looks at her cards and displays happy feet, you can assume she has high confidence in his hand; if, at the same time, her eyes dilate, she executes an elevated chip toss when she bets, and then she leans back, interlacing her hands behind her head (all high-confidence tells), you can be 99.99 percent she has a great hand and the confidence to match.
  5. Track a player's tells over the entire course of each hand dealt. When an opponent shifts from a high-confidence to a low-confidence tell as new cards are revealed (or vice versa), this is particularly useful information. In one World Poker Tour event, a player checked his hole cards, moved her arms and body forward (high-confidence tells), and bet aggressively. After seeing the flop, however, she moved her arms and body away from the table (low-confidence tells). Another player, possibly aware of her behavior, made a large bet and she folded. When a person's tells mirrors the changing strength of her hand, this is money in the bank for the alert observer.
  6. Watch for micro-gesture tells, those behaviors that occur for a moment immediately after a significant table event. If they are followed by secondary nonverbal behaviors that conflict with the initial reaction, then trust the micro-gesture tell, as it tends to be the more honest. An example here would be a person who, upon seeing his cards, steeples his fingers for a moment (high-confidence tell involving touching the spread fingertips from both hands together in an arched position) and then begins wringing his hands together (low-confidence tell).
  7. In general, tells of engagement tend to be related to greater hand strength, while pacifying behaviors tend to be associated with lower hand strength, bluffing, and/or unhappiness with specific actions at the table (bets, loss of a band, dangerous chip or cash deficiency).
  8. Observe your opponents and remember how they play. Their past behavior can be a helpful predictor of their future behavior. As always, observed tells are most useful to you when (a) you are familiar with your opponent's play and know that a specific tell has been an accurate indicator of high or low confidence in the past; (b) after studying the behavior of an opponent you're facing for the first time, you determine that his confidence displays are, in fact, accurate indicators of his hand strength.