Read your opponent
In poker, there are many things worth knowing. Your math sense needs to be sharp, you need to know all the rules and as much strategy as possible. But one of the most important things is the ability to read the other players: your opponents. Also, by having the knowledge about how to this, you will be able to make it much harder for others to read you.
A tell is when someone does something that gives away their state or emotion. Maybe you even reveal the fact that you are holding something, or – worse – the fact that you are not. One of the most famous examples of this, in the movie world at least, is one of the key scenes in “Rounders”, the poker movie. Character Teddy KGB regularly cracks open cookies during his games, and listens to the sound of them opening. When he meets the hero of the movie, Mike, Mike realizes that Teddy KGB only eats the cookie when he has a good hand. If he doesn’t have a good hand, he just keeps the cookie in his hand. When Mike notices this, he stays quiet for one round, just to make sure that he is correct in his assumption. But then he actually tells Teddy KGB about the fact that he knows. For somebody else, this might appear foolish, since he has valuable knowledge, but Teddy KGB gets so put off by this that it makes him totally exposed.
In other words, a tell is when your opponent in one way or another give you a clue about what he has. Sometimes tells can be faked, of course, which is a tricky thing. Always read the other players as carefully as you can. And remember that you, too, can fake a tell.
There are several kinds of tells. It could be that you play with your chips, how often you swallow, the way you breathe, if you fidget with the cards, if you lean forward or backward in your seat when you are betting … Be careful that you don’t change your tone of voice or your facial expressions just because you get excited or let down by your cards. If you are a smoker, try not to smoke at all at the table. Otherwise, you will want to smoke when getting nervous, and this will be a perfect tell to others. There can be tells in online poker too.
Concentration, calm and self restraint are all important things here, regardless if you play IRL or online. And, as always, practice will take you a long way.
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