How Important are Tells in Poker: Poker specific (part 4 of 4)

Poker specific tells deal with the information you can glean only at a poker table. Without the chips and the cards, you wouldn’t be privy to these tells. A few examples of poker related tells are:

• Glancing down at chips is a surefire sign of a powerhouse hand. Players often subconsciously look at their chips, since they intend to bet, or may look at your chip stack in anticipation of it migrating to theirs.
• Forcefully betting with chips is most likely a bluff; and conversely meekly betting with chips usually indicates a strong hand. There is that strong means weak; weak means strong aspect again.
• Looking away from the flop is a sign of a strong hand, while a player staring at the flop usually indicates a missed hand. The look away is something along the lines of not wanting to get caught with their hand in the cookie jar: The stare down is the person’s attempt to change the flop -just as a person stares in disbelief when something happens in real life.
• When three of the same suit flop, a player rechecking their hole cards probably has 1 of the suit, and most likely has an Ace. Players remember if they have suited cards and remember their hand as Ace-Three of Hearts; off-suit cards often register as Ace-Three off-suit. So, players often have to recheck their cards to see if one of them (and which one) is a Heart.
• Shuffling cards (or squeezing a card) in 7-Stud or Draw poker usually indicates the player is on flush draw, since players are unlikely to shuffle 2-pair (or 4 to a straight) around. Most poker players like to keep their hand neat and easily readable for the other players. Therefore it would be odd for someone with two-pair to ‘mix’ them. Ditto with squeezing; players who squeeze are usually looking at the color of the card not the rank.

Like most tells, poker specific tells are incredibly accurate when they are committed by recreational players. These are the tells that sink these players, no matter how skillful they are. Recreational players often wonder how a player could have called/folded/raised after the hand; the answer is that their opponent likely picked up a tell on them.

Similar to body language tells, decent players who play sporadically, will often try to throw off reverse tell from this category. However, they will not seem as awkward as they do when they attempt to fake body language tells, since the poker specific tells are fairly simple to mimic.

Seasoned players will appear to have numerous tells from this category, because they will be constantly throwing them off as reverse tells, and also as reverse, reverse tells. If an experienced player is exuding some of these tells they are basically worthless to you; you’ll never know if it’s legitimate or not.