One Vital Poker

In live poker, games revolve mainly around tells. Especially when hardened pros play each other, you won’t find anyone playing their cards, but rather their opponents, and that means that poker tells will become extremely important indeed.

In live poker, there is an abundance of poker tells, so these guys can certainly work with them. In online poker however, such tells are scarce.

With players protected by the relative anonymity conferred by the internet, they will give out far fewer tells than live players do. This however, doesn’t mean you should stop looking for tells altogether. On the contrary: pay bigger attention to online poker tells, because here, they will literally mean the difference between winning or losing.

One of the most important poker tells is universal (available both on and offline): the betting pattern. You’ll be able to take exactly as much advantage of your opponent’s betting patterns online as you would offline.

Experience shows that players will give away their cards through betting patterns simply because they have no choice. Think about it like this: you have a monster hand and you manage to disguise it perfectly (doing whatever it takes to achieve that), yet you fail to generate enough action, thus you see you’ll end up with an empty pot. At this point, you simply must do something. You are forced to by the circumstances, and thus, even if that means blowing your cover, you bet.

Your main objective in poker is always to win as much as possible on strong hands, and lose as little as possible on weak ones. Your actions will always reflect that.

Other potentially useful poker tells are: the speed of betting. If there’s this guy who bets into you like greased lightning, chances are he’s trying to look intimidating. Why would he want to do that? Quite probably, because he’d like you to fold. That means he’s not 100% certain of the strength of his hand, so you may actually stand a good chance of beating him.

Then again, it may also be a fish getting anxious on his monsters…there’s no sure way of knowing, and this is valid for all tells: they’re never 100% reliable but they are just about the best sources of information you’ll get.

A quick check usually means the player in question had his auto check option ticked (or the fold/check button). That means he doesn’t see any value in his hand, so a reasonable bet here will probably earn you the pot.

This is exactly why you shouldn’t really use any of the auto options available in online poker rooms either (with the possible exception of the Auto-post Blinds button).

When you see someone take a longer period of time before betting, it usually means they are on something big and they’re trying to figure out how much to bet not to scare people away but rather to keep them feeding the pot. It may also be that the opponent in question is simply having trouble with the bet-slider to set the appropriate amount he wants to bet. This is usually a sign of strength.

On the other hand, when someone is taking longer than usual to act and then he merely checks, it could mean that he’s selling you baloney. He’s trying to make you believe he has something and that he’s trying to slowplay it, when in fact he has nothing and he’s probably getting ready for a bluff.

Checking is always a sign of weakness. That’s why you don’t see good poker players check often. They know that a hand which is not worth raising, is not worth playing at all.

Believe it or not, some online poker players will tell you the hand that they’re holding. It’s happened to me and it happens in online poker rooms all the time. These guys are most likely trying to mislead you, but sometimes they will try to capitalize on the fact that they know you know.
Tells are pretty unreliable edges in poker, especially compared to fixed edges like rakeback and table selection. Nonetheless, you should take full advantage of them whenever available.