Poker Tells
If you enter the world of online poker and you will start having to deal with your own poker tells. It’s all well and good for you to use other people’s poker tells against them, but the very last thing that you want to do is to have your own used against you!
Many people are drawn to online poker rooms and find them more appealing than real life poker games. They enjoy the lack of real people seated right next to you that you usually have to have to deal with. You can play in your bathrobe and slippers at any hour of the day or night and no one will be wiser for it. Because of that they have the feeling that they can win more easily at online poker.
You can have as many curlers in your hair, or be as ungroomed as you like and no one will come to politely ask you to clean up. Hey, no one will even care if you don’t take a wash for an entire week!
If you leave your online poker world and go out for the real thing you will not only have to do all of these things, but you will also have to guard your behavior against the eagle eyes of the other players, who will all be looking to see what your particular poker tells are. A good way of guarding yourself against such people is to develop a poker face, that lets no one know what you are really thinking.
This is after all part of the fun of playing poker, to be able to interact with people and to try and read them correctly. So although you might have to guard against other people reading you like a book, you can be assured that they will also have to guard against you doing the same to them. Luckily the world of poker tells is a two-way street and you can use other players’ poker tells against them.
However, if you are playing against someone who has a very good poker face, or someone who is used to guarding their emotions very well, you might have a tougher time of it than you think.
Most really experienced players play poker in a way that you can't really tell what they are doing, or whether they are even using your eagle eyed examination of their playing methods against you.
This can very easily be done by someone who is used to controlling their every expression and gesture and who is used to not giving away much information. All these players need to do is to make a false tell, and that’s it, you’re caught, hook, line and sinker. When you try to use their poker tell against them, you will find that it backfires on you!
These are of course the many pitfalls of trying to use players’ poker tells against them, and the best thing that you could do would be study a player for consistency in his poker tells before you decide to act on them.
Most people, even those players who are experienced will find it difficult to remember exactly which of the poker tells they have been using throughout the game if they have an entire repertoire at their hands!