I recently played a session of 5-500 spread limit poker against a lineup that is typical of modern small- to mid-stakes big-bet games. (Structurally speaking, spread-limit poker is not “big bet” poker, but the stacks were short enough that being prevented from making a single bet or raise bigger than $500 made little practical difference.) My opponents were thoughtful and experienced players, but they had many of the leaks one often finds in live games, and their goals in playing poker were obviously social as well as financial.
In my six-hour session I spent plenty of time studying my right-hand opponents and also playing pots against them. Here I’ll describe three pots against the same player, who was two seats to my right; each of these three hands involves some physical information.
These aren’t hands where a single “tell” revealed information that led me to the right choice. Most poker hands aren’t like that. These are hands where my range-building, decision making, and attempts to manipulate my opponents were guided in part by physical and verbal information, and where I had to combine evidence of different kinds. The information didn’t always change my decision, and I didn’t always come up with the most effective lines. I have found the hands useful to review, however, because they involve the sort of physical information that is often available in live games, and because that information so often, as here, gives only part of an answer to the question of how to proceed in a hand. I think they teach many lessons about what to look for, and about how to think about what you see.
The opponent in these hands is a cardroom regular who surely considers himself a savvy, skilled player. He has some justification for his confidence: He is not bad at getting a rough sense of whether his opponents are strong or weak; he is willing to bluff and understands that different bet sizes can be useful for different purposes; and although he plays too many hands, he folds a lot of the hands that he ought to be folding, and he would much rather play in position than out of position.
All that said, his approach to the game sometimes lacks nuance. While he understands that his image might cause his opponents to be skeptical of him, he often fails to see a hand from his opponent’s perspective, and he often seems motivated by a desire to “pull a play off” rather than from a fundamental understanding of how different kinds hands ought to be played in a given situation. It is telling, I think, that he routinely puts the wrong amount of money in the pot when calling a preflop raise; he often hasn’t noticed exactly how big the raise is.
About three hours into the session, this opponent raised to $45 from the small blind after one player had limped from middle position. The player between us was taking a walk, so I was in the big blind. I had JJ.
JJ is often an obvious three-betting hand, but a raise this large–nine big blinds over just one limper–often indicates a very strong hand from this kind of player. More importantly, it tends _not_ to indicate the sort of hand that makes three-betting work so well: I can’t get a reraise called by 99 or AJ if he is very unlikely to choose that raise size with those hands. I just called $40 more, and the limper folded. I had roughly $500 behind and he covered me.
The flop came QT8. He led out for $55 into the $89 pot (after rake). This is a good flop for my hand, and I would like to protect my hand against AK and AJ, but any raise large enough to be useful against those hands would open me up to an all-in reraise. It’s often right to accept the risk of an all-in reraise, but that is most true when the costs of folding to (or calling) that raise are small. Here, however, I didn’t want to call an all-in bet, but I didn’t want to fold to it either. Even a four- or six-out draw is significant equity to be folding away with two cards to come, and I could not even be very sure of being behind in the case where I faced an all-in bet.
For these reasons, I decided to just call the $55. The turn was a small card. He checked. With just one card to come, and with many of the same problems lurking if I bet the turn that weighed against a flop raise, I checked behind. Perhaps this is a mistake, and I could have safely bet-folded this turn; not fearing a free card very much, however, I chose to check and see a river in position.
The river was another small card and he bet again: $125, if my notes are correct. In a vacuum this is a fairly straightforward call, but in a live setting it is much closer, for a several reasons. First, many opponents will figure that a bluff has little chance of succeeding, especially against someone with my image. Second, many opponents will want to see a showdown with AK or even AJ, no matter how unlikely it is that those hands would win in a showdown. This desire often leads them to check and call.
So, I had a decision. As I was thinking it over, my opponent showed his hand to his neighbor, holding it up so that it was perpendicular to the table. His neighbor immediately and briefly chortled. The bettor then made some idle chat with the neighbor (“What do you think of that?”).
This was a lot of extra information, some of which weighed in favor of a fold and some of which weighed in favor of a call:
First, it was important to note that however easy it is to fake a reaction, it’s very hard to fake a neighbor’s reaction. Even if the neighbor is his friend and would like to reinforce whatever story the bettor is telling, he probably isn’t prepared to be shown the hand, and he doesn’t have the same sort of personal attachment to it that causes people to, for example, act strong when they’re weak.
Second, the neighbor’s reaction suggests that the bettor’s hand is not on either extreme of his range. In these cases, it would have been more natural to try to suppress a reaction, which the neighbor did not try to do.
Third, when an opponent raises his hand off the table or shows it to someone, that often means that he wants you think that he is comfortable, that he wants you to think that he is *not* comfortable, or that he wants you to do something other than what he thinks you’re about to do. Unsurprisingly, in my experience, this behavior means different things in different contexts and from different players. If it’s not a desperate attempt to change your behavior, however, it at least tends to be a reliable signal that he is not embarrassed at his play of the hand. Here, it does not provide conclusive evidence either way, but it suggests slightly that he is not bluffing.
I thought for a while and decided that given the unusual preflop action, which roughly 2/3 of the time indicates a narrow range of strong preflop hands that players fear losing with, I should fold my jacks. The non-betting evidence didn’t indicate a monster, but it didn’t indicate a bluff either, and I couldn’t find many non-bluff hands I was beating. AK was the most plausible candidate, and my best evidence suggested he didn’t have that hand, and could more easily have a hand like KK.
When I folded, he showed A8s; it turned out that he had just been talking about that hand with his neighbor. All along, I had not been in the likely scenario of facing a very strong preflop hand; rather, his unusual play had been prompted by a correspondence between the conversation and his hand (and, one suspects, a desire to drive some action). Note that although this is an _a priori_ unlikely scenario, it adequately explains all the physical information above. As usual, the physical information shapes judgments of what sort of situation one is likely to be in, but it only very rarely tells the whole story.
A bit later, the same opponent limped from early position, I raised to $20 with JT from middle position, a late-position player called, and he called.
The flop came J73 with a flush draw (I didn’t have any flush cards). The eight-seat checked, I bet $40, the late-position caller folded, and the eight-seat cut out some stacks of four red chips. He thought for a couple seconds, added an extra pile at the last second, and shoved out $120 worth of chips without verbalizing a number.
Although the board was draw-heavy, and although he figured to have many draws in his limp-calling range, I immediately put him on a value hand. The first reason will be the least interesting to people who are not playing against this specific player, but it is the most important: This player varied his raising behavior, and both failing to verbalize and shoving out several stacks of chips at once had been correlated with value-raises. The best physical information is opponent-specific and understood through careful individual observation, not though reading manuals that propose general correspondences between behaviors and meanings.
More generally, however, the behavior of going back to add a few more chips before putting out a raise is at least slightly correlated with stronger value hands, in my experience. A couple psychological tendencies suggest why this is the case. First, players are simply a bit more likely to try to build up the pot a little more when they have a stronger hand. Second, they are generally less afraid of calling attention to themselves or doing things that seem unusual when they have strong hands.
I quietly folded my weak top pair hand, and my opponent showed KJ. This reiterates the lesson about opponent-specificity: most players would–for good reason–not consider KJ to be such a strong value hand. Moreover, we should remember that just because an opponent has a value hand does not mean he can’t be run off his hand; sometimes people raise “for information” with value hands, and sometimes they are confident at the time but can be made to believe they’re beat. Here it is inadvisable to get too tricky against his range of made hands, which includes too many sets (and perhaps the odd AJ or J7s) to go to war against, especially since I block the weaker part of his value range. In general, however, we must remember that there are many different kinds of value ranges, and getting a rough sense of where your opponent is in his range is no substitute for figuring out exactly what to do against that range.
The two of us played a third hand that involved not only interpretation but manipulation. With one or two players walking, I raised from early position with KQo. This same opponent called from the big blind and we went to the flop heads-up.
As the dealer collected the money, I checked my cards, as is my habit. My opponent said: “You can’t have Aces, because you had to check your cards.” As it happens, that’s not true (I think I double-check the ranks and suits no matter what I have), but its truth or falsity is not the most important question to ask when we’re figuring out what our opponent is thinking.
First, notice that this opponent is likely to be testing me: he is often thinking about the possibility that I have a very strong hand because I raised in early position. Given that he spoke directly to me, it means that he is expecting a response. Finally, although he would tend to call this raise too loosely, the suggestion that he is in a positionally sensitive frame of mind suggests that his range is stronger than other players’ might be, or that his might be at other times.
Note that this line of thinking is partially predicated on the assumption that his questioning is genuine, in the sense that he is not talking about strong hands because he has a weak one, or engaging in mild bullying because he is weak and would like me to play passively. Such interpretations should be considered carefully, and all I can say here is that the question seemed to me to have the ring of authenticity. It seemed that he was saying it because he was thinking it or because he wanted to show off, not because he was eager to deceive me.
My standard response to any such question is silence; that is the best default for most players. Here, however, I took a different path. This seemed to be a player who, in David Sklansky’s phrase, “likes to realize things.” If this was true, and if he was worried about the strength of my hand, I could encourage him in his fear. I replied: “You’re right; I don’t have Aces.”
By doing this, I attempted to make him think that I was being clever by saying something that is technically true but misleading; I wanted him to think that I was revealing that I had a strong hand, or at least not a KQ-type hand. Although I usually don’t give opponents credit for understanding poker psychology very well, I think that this sort of behavior is common enough that he would attach a standard meaning to it, at least subconsciously. Moreover, I am confident enough in my fundamentals and in my physical control that even if my ploy didn’t have the desired effect, I wouldn’t be giving up too much information.
The flop came small: 632 rainbow. He checked, I bet $20, and he thought for a few seconds before folding AJ faceup. There is, of course, no way of knowing what effect my behavior had on him, but I strongly doubt that this player standardly folds AJ on this board to a half-pot bet.
I do not mean to suggest that I played this hand, or any of the three hands, perfectly or even well. Rather, my goal has been to give a variety of over-the-felt examples of observations, evidence, and considerations that I take to be important.
I also hope that these hands illustrate the ubiquity and character of physical information. Too often, people think of “tells” as something like religious revelation: they come along rarely, but there’s no mistaking the meaning. Neither aspect of this is correct: rather, physical information comes along all the time, and it usually admits of several interpretations. Most of this evidence is only slightly useful, but it makes a big difference in the aggregate.
For those who prefer more concrete advice, here are a few more general lessons that these hands illustrate:
(1) If you try to use physical and verbal information to figure out an opponent’s exact hand, you will often get yourself into trouble; if, however, you use such information modestly and combine it with betting information, you will often reach useful conclusions.
(2) Most of us are better off doing what we can to opt out of the game of using verbal and physical ploys to mislead our opponents. It is distracting to us, its effects are uncertain, and useful information is often leaked along with the possibly misleading message. In some situations, however, where you a very specific read on your opponent’s mindset, a narrow message can be effective.
(3) In each of these three hands, my opponent gave me valuable information by showing his hand unnecessarily. These gave me both specific information about how he plays certain hands and general information about how he thinks about the game. It is very rarely correct to give free information in this way.