Do you read me?

Ever watched your favourite player on TV make an astounding call on the river with bottom pair and beat a huge bluff? How about hearing the person next to you in a card room conspiratorially let you in on their guess as to two other players’ hands and be proven spot on? The first time one of my mother’s friends put me at age 15 on two specific cards at our nickel and dime home game I nearly fell off my chair. How do they do that? There is no one answer – this is just one of those continual questions in poker, and big bet poker in particular – how do I interpret other people’s actions, or how do I get a read?

Impossible though it might at first seem to be able to accurately read opponents, a useful first step is careful player characterisation (see: ‘Putting Players in Boxes’). Next, it’s possible to make a conscious effort (at least to start off with) to remember each player’s moves, and build up a little pattern library, which is the only real information source you’ll get when playing against someone for the first time. Some people (I’m thinking about players like Phil Ivey and the somewhat erratic Gus Hansen) seem to have an uncanny ability to look at someone and ‘sense’ strength or weakness in specific hands or in a different sense, overall, and act with confidence accordingly.

Without building up hope that I will one day be able to do that kind of thing, I don’t think there’s any harm in assessing what these top players are making these judgements on, and trying to harness the information. After all, they don’t get any special treatment – the same twitches, verbal clues and, more importantly, hand information are available to any player at any table who pays attention to them.

The top players’ kind of sixth sense is partly a natural empathy or sensitivity to other people (you’ll be no good at that if you’re the type of person who doesn’t notice their girlfriend’s new haircut or on whom sarcasm goes undetected) and partly a total use of all available help. Accurate recall and some solid thousands of hands’ experience are pretty much prerequisites for this to start coming naturally, if you’re not a psychologist with a maths degree and a photographic memory.

You might think that the best place to start is with ‘tells,’ those little signs present in language both body and verbal, which ‘give away’ a player’s strength, or confirm that they’re lying with their bet. In the movies, someone’s raised eyebrow is perhaps a signal to the canny player that his opponent is bluffing. In real life it is probably just a facial tic. There are the occasional wonderful players who do put up a neon sign flashing “I have a real/ don’t have a real hand,” such as a chatty player I encountered in California’s Bicycle Casino whose patter stopped abruptly whenever he was hoping for a call to come to his monster, but these are few and far between.

What is a tell, anyway, without the repetition needed to give the sense of pattern on which decisions can be made? If a player continually bets his chips in a little stack, and then every now and then throws them out in a line towards the pot, it is only through seeing him, for example, show a busted draw or some type of bluff at the end more than once that this behaviour can be classified as a tell. If someone has just sat down and makes any sort of bet, raised eyebrow or no raised eyebrow, there are simply no grounds for making decisions based on it. Yet. The exceptions are behaviours which many players seem to exhibit in equivalent situations. Mike Caro’s Book of Tells, for example, lists many of the most common visual signs of strength and weakness which have been noticed in many different players over the years Mike’s been playing poker. The caveat remains, however: just because a lot of players exhibit behaviour A in situation B, this does not mean that all players do so, or even that the same player always does exactly the same thing.

A good example of this is tilt – a solid-looking player whom you may have classified as a Rock might lose one too many hands on a bad beat and start making bets which earlier might have signified great strength, but now only signify that they’ve finally lost the plot. Situations and players’ general demeanour are not things to lose sight of, even if you reckon that some obvious signs have been helping you out for a while. People change according to mood, level of intoxication, and whether they’re winning or losing. They can also ‘act,’ or fake tells for your benefit. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve watched a (usually young) player squirm and frown and look at their hand before re-raising all-in. Luckily, this kind of thing is among the more noticeable false tells, but there are lots of traps which can be set for players with an eye out for player reactions but who don’t give others credit for having the same knowledge.

To be preoccupied with staring down an opponent in order to ‘get a read’ is to lose sight of the hard facts which are there to be absorbed. Instead of using all that concentration on someone’s face when they’ve put you specifically to a decision, spread it out watching all the players, especially in hands you’re not personally involved in. While they stare at each other, you can file away how they bet when they do or don’t have a hand, what range of hands they play in what position, and whether they appear sensitive to things like pot odds and if so, how sensitive. I have found that when my own tournament life/cash chips are not involved, I think more clearly about how players are acting and generally make better reads on players when not involved in a pot.

This is probably just an idiosyncratic weakness, but the point about watching all the time remains a good one. I used to give myself a score out of five for every showdown other people reached where I had a stab at guessing their hands (where one was ‘right ball park’ and five was ‘both cards spot on’). Still not stellar at this, I reckon it can’t possibly hurt your game, and may give a little extra incentive to concentrate all the time and not just listen to your Ipod or eat a sandwich when the pressure’s on someone else.

To end with an example – I was playing in a no-limit freezeout with a pretty decent-sized starting stack, but with a fairly low buy-in. The player to my immediate right was as tight as spin-dried denim and had raised pre-flop with Queens, Jacks and AK suited, kindly showing the winning hand the time he didn’t reach showdown. He only liked to be in a pot in position, and was yet to show anything resembling a bluff. He displayed the classic shaky-hand tell on which I’m sure Mike Caro can illuminate you (shaking is more often a sign of strength than weakness) and combined it with the great call-me Dwell.

After about an hour of folding (he played 12 hands during the whole tournament), he raised six big blinds under the gun, hands a-tremble, which was still only a small part of his stack. “Kings or Aces?” was the only question. I called with pocket fives, and hit the miracle flop: 5 8 J rainbow. He bet a quarter of his stack, I minimum raised, and he eventually re-raised all in with his AA. Two more Jacks popped out giving him the higher full house and knocking me out, but the idea was right. As his previous play narrowed the range of hands he could have to just one or two, hitting a big hand like that was a good chance to get the lot in one go. It doesn’t always work out, but I never feel too bad if I go out having made a decent stab at a read.

Not everyone is blessed with an intuitive card sense or empathy with other people, but these situations where it is easy to put a player on a specific hand can be very profitable. Reading players, like many of the skills involved in poker, gets easier with practise, and can’t be learned from books alone. There’s nothing new under the sun – the more you see a certain bet in a certain situation by a certain character-type, the easier it is to exploit the information that’s there for the taking. It may look like a supernatural skill, almost, but although few people become so adept at reading it’s like second nature, everyone can improve through patient practise and observation.