Monday, January 12, 2009 - John Greene
The other day, a friend of mine popped Rounders into my DVD player for me. I’d actually never seen the movie, instead choosing to watch things that have nothing to do with what I consider “work,” and I knew that there’d be a few things in there that would drive me up the wall. I was right, of course.
John Malkovich plays Tony KGB, a supposedly amazing poker player who had a fatal tell. Now, I get that Hollywood has to play things up a bit, but really, would anybody who dramatically split open and ate an Oreo every time he had a strong hand versus just playing with it when he was bluffing even make it past Round Two of the local VFW’s Wednesday Night Poker Tournament? It’s so obvious, it’s laughable. If you actually ever see someone doing something that melodramatic at the tables, I guarantee they’re just messing with you.
Look to the (excellent) Casino Royale and how Le Chiffre plays Bond’s knowledge of his tells against him. While not everyone will have a Felix Leiter handy to feed bad information to the person playing opposite them, a player can set up their opponents for failure by creating a smokescreen of false tells. The mercurial table behavior of our own Phil Hellmuth is a fantastic example of how to do this: you literally never know what he’s thinking and while his flamboyance plays against my own table philosophy, I can see why it works so well for him.
Tags: james bond, john malkovich, Phil Hellmuth, poker tells, rounders
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Monday, December 8, 2008 - John Greene
Last week, I talked about looking for online poker tells in other players and while it’s easy to reverse-engineer most of that advice to work to help your own games out, but I wanted to talk about a couple of things that could really help out just about every player who plays online poker at UltimateBet or another online poker room.
Timing, Timing, Timing
We’ve all experienced it in a live poker game, where we actually get in a strange zone where we don’t know if we’re actually thinking or if we’re trying to make them think we’re thinking. With online poker, you’ve got a countdown clock (generally less than 30 seconds) and the autoplay buttons, which means people expect faster play and view anything that might be an attempt to slow down the game with suspicion. I actually sat down with a stopwatch and trained myself to consistently make decisions in 15 seconds. Yes, I am that nerdy.
Don’t Give Away The Game
Hey, you, Mr or Miss Chat Box? Shut up.
Yeah, I said it. You can give away way, way more information than you’d think every time you get chatty at the tables. In a live game, where there’s other people physically there, a bit of chatter is a good thing, but calling out “Finally!” when you win a hand or bragging about someone else’s bad beat (and your bit of pure luck) gives others insights into the way you play, something you don’t necessarily want in online poker.
Be Unfailingly Polite
This kind of falls into the previous category, but if you ever lose a hand to someone and you must feel the need to say something, turn your “Go f*** yourself” into “Great hand! Good play!” or something like that. You can be raging away at the computer, breaking your keyboard and telling people in IM that this doofus took your money while hold a pair of fives, but at the table itself, people should get the impression that you’re cool as a ten Fonzies.
Plus, you know, they might not mind losing to you so much if you’re nice about the whole thing.
Tags: online poker tells, poker tells
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Monday, December 1, 2008 - John Greene
One of the reasons a lot of players are attracted to online poker is the fact that their normal “tells” are removed from the game entirely. Gone is that habit of tapping your temple like Le Chiffre in Casino Royale (and look at how he turned that to his advantage for a real poker lesson) or swallowing heavily when finding out you’ve got pocket rockets! This means you can bluff all you want and win, right?
Wrong. More people than you’d think can pick up on the fact that you ‘re bluffing because online poker tells stick out like a sore thumb to regulars at the tables, especially if they’ve played with you before. Here are three of the most common online poker tells and what can you do to take advantage of them or eliminate them from your online poker game?
Online Poker Tells: Autoplay
You may well be able to find out how strong a player’s cards are from their use of the software’s “Fold” “Raise Any” and “Call Any” check boxes. If a player consistently raises while playing, it’s not rocket science to determine that he’s holding a strong hand. The same goes for “Check,” where the player may have a week hand. If a player fells strongly enough about a hand to make their decision before seeing the players around them play, that’s a red flag and worth paying attention to. I recommend changing things up a bit and avoiding using these checkboxes, instead timing each play whenever possible to create a consistent, thoughtful profile that will leave other players guessing.
Online Poker Tells: Folding Cards
With online poker, it’s easy to just fold cards that you won’t want to play. These “trash hands” are the bane of the serious player and you can find out if someone is one by seeing how often they fold. You may not get a good picture in a single game, but over the course of three or four games, you’re going to get a good picture of them as a player. While I’d never recommend playing 3-5 off-suit, I have seen others do exactly that sort of thing to throw others off their scent. In one case,4-5 suited ended up with a straight flush and a won tournament!
Online Poker Tells: Beginner’s Mistakes
When people that aren’t experienced at the game begin to play poker online, they frequently chase cards and their gameplay can be an indication of how weak or strong their hand is. They’ve read a poker book that tells them to bet with a weak hand and act weak when they’ve got a strong one to lure people in and that’s all they will do at the table. Pay attention to players that don’t maximize their cards; if you see they’ve not taken advantage of Triple Aces while losing money when holding 6-9 offsuit, well…that’s somebody that should have money taken from them.
There’s lots of ways that you can make sure that your online poker tells are eliminated and I’ll cover some more next week.b
Tags: online poker tells, poker tells
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