1/3 NL, deep stacks.

Villain in BB, limped around 7 ways to the flop.

Flop: 7 5 J

Villain bets $15 into 6 other players.

Turn: 9

Villain shrugs and tosses in $40.

Gee whiz fellas, what could villain possibly have

Hint: it isn't 99.

Well, we know he has 'something' but it could be as strong as 8T all the way down to 'vulnerable' 1-pair hands like AxJx. How many players called the Flop bet? How much of the pot was the $40?

I've seen guys shrug with AA here just because they 'know' that the card probably hit 'most' of the remaining players and made their position less desirable to deal with going forward. GL

ya i bet he had 8 10

Here is where betting patterns becomes important. Because he bet the turn and shrugged when he bet on the river, it is far more reasonable to figure the turn bet was a decent draw.

In this case it was, he was called and showed 86o.

Tells work in concert with other game information and betting patterns are far more important than tells.

The shrug when betting, for your average recreational/tourist-y type player, will be highly likely to be a very strong hand.

The read goes down a bit in usefulness the more the player has played. I've seen pretty decent (but still bad) players at the $5-10 and $2-5 cash level do a shrug with medium-strength hands (and a handful of times as reverse tells or just weirdness w/ bluffs, but super rare). But overall for your average player, it's highly likely to be a very strong.

I disagree it will often be one-pair or two-pair type hands, because those players don't want action and are happy taking the pot and so don't really want to accidentally communicate weakness and induce action. I mean, it will sometimes be, I just am much more likely to be afraid of a big hand if I see this behavior than I am to think it's medium-strength.

Most of the more useful examples of this behavior will be more subtle; just like a slight upward turn of the hand when placing a bet or a tilt of the head (both parts of a shrug). But still, a player has to be pretty inexperienced to be doing even the more subtle stuff.

Was just going through my televised poker notes, looking at shrugs. Might put together a video compilation on this.

Interestingly, I found a bunch of examples of Jamie Gold shrugging when bluffing/semi-bluffing; fits with his pattern of telling the truth a lot (which was confusing to a lot of experienced poker players).

I just went over a bunch of instances of shrugging, and there are a good number of them happening with medium-strength hands from average/recreational players. How these instances usually happen is when a player is pretty short in a tournament setting with a hand like top pair or overpair on the flop or turn and shoves for not much more than is in the pot. So it is kind of a genuine "eh, what can I do?" behavior with a good hand.

My experience is more in cash games, so I'm more used to taking it into account on big bets on the turn or the river; for those bigger bet situations I think it'll be much more likely to be a very strong hand.