Although not technically a tell, in the same galaxy.

I am really interested in techniques to induce a call or a fold. Especially in tournaments, I feel like controlling the tone of the social aspect can be the best way to make people do what you want.

For example:
I am short stacked and want to start stealing a lot of the games. I bring up a classic episode of Breaking Bad and, of course, a couple guys get really engaged talking about how good Breaking Bad was. While people are enjoying a chat they aren't going to focus on every single hand or try to make big moves and calls and start playing a lot more straight up.

Another example:
Not everyone is in the casino to win money, a lot of tables have the old retired guy. I chat him up about his wife, what he did for a living or whatever and I seem really interested. I told this old FOX News viewer I knew nothing about politics and was interested in Trump and he was so happy and felt so important manplaining things to me. When the big hand happens I lean in, smile and am like "Come on, go easy on me, you have it, right?" and he shows me. This move works quite a bit. Patting guys on the back when they win hands and shaking your head when they lose is a particularly effective moment to ingratiate yourself, as those are emotional and lonely moments where people are vulnerable to your calculated sympathies.

It goes without saying I am a sociopath, right?

I would never admit this in real life, but the character I play in a casino has nothing in common with how I act outside a casino and I have a number of "characters" I slip into without thinking about it based on who is at my table.

That said, I am very interested in other tactics for making a guy who is obviously about to fold call by goading him, insulting him or intimidating him.

Phil Helmuth uses this kind of game and it is super transparent what he is doing but it seems to work. People play bad cards against him to try to suck out because he is annoying and he has made a career of that stupid social game. A lot of the better pro's seem to play on this level and I feel like making a guy feel like he is your buddy and show you your cards while laughing is a higher level of poker than being the guy who can read people breathing perfectly.

It depends if you're a good enough actor, natural enough to pull this off. I don't know you so I have no idea, but if you're not a really good natural conversationalist, people will proably pick up on what you're doing. I know because there was this guy who would play a lot at my room and he would chat people up, very obviously and you could just tell he wasn't sincere. He engaged me and I talked to him for a while, and I felt a little dirty afterwards. Stuff like that makes people not want to play with you.

I find that being genuinely sincere and interesting makes people play soft against you. One time a guy told me, "I raised because I wanted you to fold (he had the nuts) because I wanted to keep hearing your jokes)" Sorry for bragging, but it makes a statement. People who are having fun with you there will play softer.

Sure, making people hate you is also a good strategy if you can live with yourself. But I guess you're a sociopath lol so it could work for you.

My examples were in cash games where the competition is much tougher. So maybe what you're tlaking about would work in soft tournaments.

I guarantee though if I'm at your table I'm going to be able to get under your skin with genuineness because that's the cryptonite to sociopaths.

Maybe I miscommunication. I am incredibly nice and sincere-seeming and fairly well liked. i look down on people who use the Phil Helmuth "annoying to become hated as an edge."

Although i do feel rather dirty sometimes. Chatting up an old man about his dead wife for an hour just to get him to possibly lay down a hand at some point is pretty gross, but honestly, so is poker on some level if you really think about it too much.

I find that people come to the casino to get something out of it. Some people are lonely, some people like to feel smart and tricky, some people are gamblers. Identifying peoples internal motivations and appealing to that aspect of them will make them like you.

I play serious tournaments and higher stakes cash games all over the place and I have never been at a table in my life where there weren't at least a few guys I could get in my pocket to some degree. My wife is actually a talented high stakes player herself (and also a sociopath) and the two of us have a routine where she works the woman thing and the two of us control the tone and keep it light. She will shamelessly do the "hey, I'm a girl, go easy on me" and do a little powty face and even hard, stoic guys crack smiles.

We have all kinds of ideas about "the social game" but getting people who want to fold to call in specific spots is the new thing I am kind of obsessed with figuring out. I watch Daniel Negraneu do it all the time and he is brilliant at it. He knows who to poke and who to stare down and who to cajole and am interested if any other players have tricks or moves. But maybe I am getting off topic.

When you have the nuts on the river and you know he is weak and ready to fold, there is nothing to lose trying stuff. Likewise talking people into folding when you want them to is possible, I imagine.

Anytime I try to talk someone into calling I fail so now I just stay silent. I think it comes down to your image. And a lot of it is the person and not you.

I think Doyle Brunson on HSP is amazing, because he plays so tight and almost never bluffs but for some reason they always pay him off. He must be a master of image and psychology. I believe in no limit holdem, there is a sort of micro-communication that goes on at the table that highly affects the table dynamics.

I watched 6 hours of Negraneu footage and got some good tricks. He has little games he plays to nudge people in the directions he wants. He seems to have an ongoing conversation with the table about their cards and keeps it light. It seems like making a basic educated guess as to what people have out loud and looking right at them is his favorite defensive move.

Like, look right at a guy and say "you have aces, I know what you have." And say it casually like you are just chatting and it certainly makes people slow down with their betting. Or if you know what they are thinking, just say it outloud. "That's a scary board to call with a middle pair, what do you even do on the turn?" Even if it is an ohvious point, giving people the impression you are both on the same wave length and thinking the same way ect can be great ways to slow people down.

For your example of the old man...
You dont need to chat it up vs OMC/NIT just to get him to show, he has it.
Range the V and head read first, then tells are icing on the cake to exploit V.

I think you have half of this right.
DN talking/being friendly at the table is DN getting a base line read of what V looks like when he is comfortable. Now during the hand DN has that baseline behavior to read V.

This next part is key-
You get a read and then RIP THE V EFF'IN HEART OUT!

If you feel "dirty" getting caught bluffing the sweet old lady then what is the point if trying to play this style? You get info and execute the plan.
Dont get reads just to hero fold but rather to relentlessly bluff capped ranges on good boards to get laydowns.Or to build pots vs the NIT that over plays big pairs vs your 47o flopped straight.
Just like when you asked OMC if he has it, you raise grandma and say I got it with your air.

Your examples of DN talking to slow V down is what ELWOOD points out in his books that DN has a weak hand trying to get info.
So if you start talking just during these spots, you can exploited. Proly not likely at low stakes.
The real difference is DN is still talking when he has a good hands to stay balanced.

People have touched on this but the best way to get info is having good rapport built up with the table. You'll be able to sense energy shifts in others much better when you have hours of back and forth dialogue between the two of you. Once you start talking to them while you're in a hand, they will leak so much nonverbal info because of the shared relationship you have developed together.

Also, someone bluffing you is a hostile move. If you are well-liked by another person they are going to be less likely to target you for a bluff. They will also be more likely to show you their cards when the hand is over.

A good way to build rapport at the table is being funny, genuine, and most importantly, not coming off like a good player. No strat talk, no big vocabulary words, no serious demeanor. Even saying purposefully dumb things so people think your poker knowledge is low or that your just here to gamble.

Wow, you must be a really friendly guy, patting guys on the back and chatting them up. Just keep doing what your doing, if thats making you money why would you try and do something else. If you want them to fold or call just experiment with something that would be considered typical for your character. Create , don't duplicate, that way you won't seem like everyone else out there trynna rob people with smiles and handshakes.

I like the word ingratiate, it has a nice ring to it.

This just happened last night. JJ in the SB limps around and I raise it to 15(1/2 table). One caller and flop comes out 88J. I bet $20 villian calls. Next card a 7. I bet $30 not wanting to scare him away, he min raises to $60 and I pause for around 30 seconds before shoving.

This is where it got interesting. He asks me "do you have J8" and I replied that there would be no way I'd be in the pot let alone raise with J8. He then asked if I had a straight. I told him maybe and that it was a scary board. After some hemming and hawing he decided to call and flipped over A8.

After the hand was over I was talking to the guy to my right and he said to me unprovoked that he thinks that I got him to call by telling him it was a scary board. Don't know that's the case but made me think of this thread and I wanted to share it.

Ok I skimmed over your op.

Personally I have genuine interest in people and generally like and want to understand them, whatever there background/age/ethnicity. I don't engage with people with the sinister intention to start having them like me so I can manipulate them using there emotional response, if certain things happen in hands that come about due to table talk then I will use them as an opportunist. I keep table talk short and funny and almost exclusively between hands, I don't want some guy blabbering his life story in my ear whilst I'm thinking through a hand.

If you were to lean into me whispering "come on take it easy on me" after we had been seemingly "getting on" I would recoil at your patheticness and think much less of you, and I think at least sub consciously this would be true for many. In poker just as in life righteousness rules. I take exeption to your type of thinking, it's the same kind of mindset that leads people to try and trick girls into sleeping with them with dumb technics, it may seem to work nown again but you will never feel good and it works way less than you think.

Want them to fold show them top pair (heads up its not illegal)
Want them to call ask them what their kicker is...
Want them to get in bed with you- act like you don't want them
Want them to go away- get up on them and GRIND

@Benat
If you are going to a poker room to live a righteous life, you fundamentally don't understand the first thing about being a degenerate or interacting with degenerates. Or what righteousness even means.

Hint: Jesus was righteous and the only time he ever flipped out was because he hated the money-changing (the poker of his day).

I think that if people in a poker room liked me and saw me as noble, that would be the most depressing thing in the world.

These guys are not my friends and they are not innocent women in a club. Any one of them would wipe out my bank account if I let them and never think twice about me again. That is our relationship.

Honestly, I find it more offensive when other players don't work with on the social game. I sat at a table where a drunk guy was being racist and throwing his money around. I was egging him on and keeping him at the table, having fun. Some guy who was a 'sporting player' got fed up with his annoying presences and asked him to leave. The drunk left. Everyone at the table scolded the sporting player with his 'social nobility', even the person of color that he had been being racist toward. We all wanted is money, because it was a poker game.

Again, I don't create bad vibes but when I see a guy sitting there full of hate that is quietly directed at me for playing the social game and he thinks I don't notice it, I'm generally pretty stoked about it. Any emotion in your opponents is an advantage that I will accept. Although, my advise to you, is to not find people 'pathetic' or 'blathering', as that is just useless emotions you don't need in your head when you are playing poker. If you start judging people in a casino, you will never be able to stop.

Get into this spot 100x a day. You make a bet on the river and you can tell villain doesn't want to call. He's clearly folding, but is there anything I can say or do to second guess himself and induce a call?

I promise you there is maybe a 5% chance, probably less, that you made him call. People don't fold A888 at 1/2. The guy next to you was just stroking your ego so that you would put on a performance for him too when you get involved in a pot with him and he wants to know if you are nutted.

If your opponent was a good player, you would have given him every reason in the world to fold. I'll tell you why:

Weak-hand statements from a bettor make strong hands more likely. Bluffers or players betting vulnerable hands don't want to remove strong hands from their range. When you remove J8 from your range, that is a weak-hand statement. A bluffer would have no incentive to do that.

Your response to 'do you have a straight' is 'maybe', so pretty neutral; I don't have too much opinion on that. I could see you doing that with both strong and weak hands (as it's a pretty ambiguous statement, as most during-hand statements are).

I also don't have too much opinion on 'it's a scary board.' I could see you saying that with strong or weak hands, either to intimidate him, or to point out that you might not bet with some strong hands, as it's a scary board.

But removing J8 from your range is very, very telling and I almost always fold if someone tells me something like that (assuming I peg them as an average, recreational player and not a good player who views me as good and is trying to level me.)

Short answer no. You get them to call with the history, image, and table talk you have been setting up the last hour plus.

yes. look at your cards. lift them up for a couple seconds and stare at it. then look back at your opponent. works like a charm. doing anything suspicious is likely to induce a call based on my experience.

try that next time see how it works.

this post is making me money in the future. thanks!!

a similar situation occured last night in fact where the board was JJ2hh and I asked the guy if he had a jack and he said no. I believed him but of course he had 22. Luckily my TT caught up on the river and I won!!

I don't know.. I've had a poker Meetup group for the last 8 years and observed hundreds of players in both poker and social situations, and, speaking of no one in particular here, I absolutely believe that if you're an ass at the table - you're an ass in real life.