Online Poker Tells

How To Tell Poker Tells

A tell is an activity that tells you something useful about the strentgh of your opponents Poker Hand Rankings or what they're likely to do next. Your goal is to observe as many tells as possible from your opponents while giving them as little information for them to work with.

The speed a person is playing can be a tell, whether it be a slow opponent who suddenly plays fast, or vica versa. Just be aware that this tell carries less reliability now that more people are multitabling, but it's still useful information in a battle for meaningful information. Having the ability to know that an opponent is currently playing on numerous tables is a useful tell as it's likely they won't be giving any game their full attention, this is where find player facilities and buddy lists can come in useful.

Poker betting patterns are a huge part of playing online poker, former WSOP champion Dan Harrington once said "A player is nothing more than the sum of his betting patterns", this is never more true than with online poker where an opponents betting patterns are the main piece of information to work with. By studying their betting patterns, you can use this information to predict the strength of their hand aswell as their likeliest actions in future betting rounds.

Anyone that uses the chat facility to reprimand their fellow players or to question the fairness of the game they're playing in is more likely than not to be in a volatile emotional state, normally players in such a state will be far more reckless than usual, put pressure on this type of player and invariably they will provide you with multiple opportunities to take their money, this does'nt mean you should change the way you intend to play but you should definitely inflict as much pressure on tilting players as possible to capitalise on the informational advantage you possess over them.

Use of third party poker software can be considered a tell that is impossible not to give off, programs like Poker Tracker allow you to gain in depth statistics on all of your opponents, it's impossible for any player not to give this tell, the more they play on a certain site, the bigger the tell they are providing to their opponents; being registered to many online cardrooms negates this tell but no measure can be taken which will completely irradicate it.

Use of preaction checkboxes in poker is a common tell, normally a player using the 'check' checkbox has a weak hand, although it could mean the exact opposite if they are trying to sell you a fake tell, the key here is simply to recognise a change in their behaviour and then try and understand what it means; if they never normally use the autocheck feature, but you notice them using it, suspect that there is a reason why they are now using this feature and tread with caution. If a player is using the 'call any' checkbox, expect them to have a hand which at very least they would like to see another community card with, for example if they were on a big draw or they had a strong made hand. Obviously, the use of checkboxes can be manipulated to give off fake tells aswell as real ones, but if you can learn anything useful from your opponents actions it will be a tell worth studying.

An opponents screen name can provide invaluable information regarding their age, sex, location, skill level and style of play; while these may all be used as fake tells, a significant amount will actually be true, plus the fake ones may still provide us with enough insight to get a usable read on them.