Live Tells - The Hands
Marcus Bateman
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Marcus Bateman /
07 May 2009 /
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Like most things in life, hard work brings in big rewards when you start to actually notice consistent nuances in how people handle chips, and spotting hand tells against good players can be one of the single most profitable features of live play
The single most important area to look at when playing live poker is your opponent's hands.
Most players go to great lengths to keep a straight poker face and limit the movement of their body when playing, but hardly anyone seems to think that about how their hands give out information.
Hands are not only a great tell because of this, but also because they have to be in constant use, and provide an endless source of data you can compare to how that particular hand played out.
Hands tend to follow the usual rules of weak means strong tells amongst weak players. Faster, more aggressive moves, such as flicking chips in instead of sliding a stack over the line, or counting out bets quicker than usual, tend to mean a player is bluffing. Conversely, slow movements with hands, such as overly carefully counting out bet sizes and slowing down the way they move chips into the pot usually indicate strength.
Although these tendencies tend to be true at the lower stakes, higher they become less pronounced, as players start to try and use their hands in a consistent manner. Here is where the tells of the hands become really interesting. I have never played against a player who did not give off some kind of tell with their hands, it is just a question of finding it and relating it to how they have played specific hands.
As a result of this, hand tells become one of the hardest things to look for and catalogue, as you have to keep constantly comparing them to the action and thinking closely about what happened in past hands.
Like most things in life, hard work brings in big rewards when you start to actually notice consistent nuances in how people handle chips, and although mentally taxing and frustrating at points, spotting hand tells against good players can be one of the single most profitable features of live play.
Make sure you watch the endless and unavoidable stream of information that is peoples hand movements, it may be that some of the best players at the table turn out to be the fish if you spot the right thing.
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