Live Tells - The Chip Glance

Marcus Bateman / Marcus Bateman / 06 May 2009 / Leave a Comment

This is the single most useful tell in low stakes poker games in my opinion. It can easily give you a complete idea of the strength of a weak player's hand, and it is very rare in poker to get such obvious and precise information, being able to collect this info and acting on it drastically increases your win rate.

The chip glance simply refers to a player looking down at their chips before the action gets to them once the flop has been dealt. This brief glance down nearly always means that this player is intending to bluff and has missed the board. The reason that this glance usually indicates this is that the player subconsciously realises that their hand cannot win the pot, therefore the only option available left to them is to bluff with their chips, hence the glance down.

Some players make this tell with such disturbing regularity that they will basically never be able to win if playing with people who notice it. They stare at the board or at their opponents around them whenever they have a hand, desperately trying to stay as passive and unassuming as possible, yet will immediately look down to their chips when they miss.

This tell is of particular value as it gives you a great way to make you appear to have a crazy reputation as well as pick up numerous nice pots. Imagine that you spot a player making this tell and decide to check raise them, safe in the knowledge that not only will they definitely bet, but they will also have to fold to your raise and win you a nice pot.

This can be a great time to flip your cards over and show the table what they will think is your quite dangerous bluff (after all, check raise bluffing with air is usually one of the more risky things to do in poker), as a result of this advertising, other players around you will stop treating your check raises with much respect, which can allow you to extract much more value from your hands when playing out of position against the other more solid players around you.

Live poker has vastly more information for you to pick up on than online poker, but you have to able to recognise and exploit these pieces of information properly. The glance down is one of the most reliable tells in low stakes games, and one which gives you the chance to not only pick up extra chips in individual hands, but also to show plays that will also generate a lot of extra action for you in the future.

**Update** There's been plenty of discussion around the poker forums about this article. It's become a semantics debate about the difference between a 'glance', a 'stare' and a 'flash down with your eyes'.

When weak players have very big hands their eyes flash down but I would not define that as a glance. Glance has some kind of time and substance behind it.

So perhaps substitute 'glance' for 'stare' if that's the side of the lingustic fence you are on.

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