Tells 101

I just read Mike Caro's Book of Tells and feel like I've learned a few very valuable things from it.

I picked it up expecting to learn how to read my opponents, and I did (more on this in a moment) but what really surprised me was finding out how many of the brilliant poker moves I had been using were, in fact, rather common tells. I am amazed that I have managed to make money playing live poker while employing tactics that any experienced player could see right through. I guess I've been lucky. Well thanks to Caro, I will no longer be doing the "reach for my chips" move when I want to make someone believe I'm on a real hand.

The day after finishing the book I went to the casino to put my new found knowledge to the test. I played at a $4/$8 limit game - pretty low stakes, which would let me concentrate on the other players without worrying about getting caught up in big monster hands. I gave myself a time limit of three hours - I know from experience that after three hours my attention wanders and my game suffers.

As Caro suggests, I kept my focus mainly on the players who had to act after me. I tried to predict, based on their reactions as they first looked at their hole cards, whether they would play their hands or not. I found that two guys were incredibly predictable. One guy almost always reached for his chips when he had a hand he wanted to play - if he didn't reach, he didn't play. The guy right after him did the opposite - he almost always made to throw the cards away if he didn't like them, and sometimes even folded out of turn. Knowing how the players behind me were going to act really helped me decide what hands to play.

Long-story-short I left, as planned, after three hours. I was up $109. How much of that was due to applying the lessons learned from Caro's book is difficult to say (and one session does not make a scientific study). Some would say I had a very lucky session: I was once dealt pocket aces, flopped another ace, while the fourth ace sat in an opponents' hand. A little later I had two fours and saw the other two fours on the flop. Sure, its easy to win money when you have monster hands, but I think I won more money on these two hands because I didn't go into my old "aw shucks, I don't really want to play this but what the heck" act. I extracted full value from my monsters, thanks, I believe, to Caro's book.

So here is the lesson for today: Study your opponents for tells, but more importantly, be aware of what tells you may have yourself.

And read Caro's Book of Poker Tells. The photographs are terrible, but the advice is solid.