Quote:
Originally Posted by oakton55
The ten best players in a live high stakes nl or plo cash game or MTTs will almost certainly have a sufficient amount of live experience/control over their body to not give away physical tells. But they will also have have solid mathematical fundamentals and a boatload of experience developing a robust thought process in how they go about making optimal adjustments to betting patterns against strong thinking opponents. If stacks are 100bb deep or less, a live player without any extensive online experience wouldn't have a chance against a table full of elite competition who come from an online background, even in a live environment.
On the other hand, elite online players without a lot of experience against live fish won't be able to crush live fish as hard as the best players with extensive live experience. This skillset involves interpreting live tells from fish and employing highly exploitive lines and unbalanced bet sizing to own them as hard as possible.
Another area where live experience comes into play is when stacks get to be 500bb+ deep. Decisions are much more complex and even elite online players with minimal live experience might be lost in some spots if they find themselves playing with more bbs in front of them than they ever have before.
The top 10 nl/plo players in a live environment have a devloped a robust thought process in how they go about decisions through their experience online and have sufficient control over their physical behavior to not give off tells. They have a good deal of live experience adjusting to deep stacks in tough lineups and own live fish as hard as possible through the use of physical tells and highly exploitive betting strategies.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Daliman
Jesus tap-dancing Christ do people make WAY too big a deal out of "tells". Players can reverse tells, you know. I do it all the time. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Kinda like "tells". Reads based on bet sizing, line, opponent range, and stack sizes are FAR more useful, period.
I shake all the time. Can't help it. Especially when I get in a big pot, regardless of my holding. I can't tell you how often people misinterpret this as strength, weakness, or whatever the F they want to think it is. They are right as often as chance, but if they want to think they used a tell on me, I certainly don't mind using it against them in the future.
"Tells" are just another tool to use when getting a "read", which aren't the same thing. I get reads all the time, they rarely have anything to do with tells.
These things ring very true. It is likely that the best 'live players' have put in extensive volume live, and can pick up on small things an online player would miss. Still, the BEST players won't just be completely feel. They should have highly functioning thought processes that guide many of their decisions. Someone who relies 100% on various reads someone gives off and not logical reasoning, deduction, and some vague idea of poker range equities (even if they don't know that's what they're doing) is doomed to fail, and therefore could never be the best live player.
Highly capable players are unlikely to give off anything, and most of the best online players thinking is so complex the minor things they might give off would be insignificant. Lets see one of these soul owners use their live read to try and bluff catch someone who has a completely balanced range in a spot and is capable of valuebetting so thin that it is almost impossible to determine if online kid appears weak because he is bluffing or valuebetting a 2nd/3rd pair.
More often than not, live I've realized these 'soul-read' live players use their tells as an excuse to justify being calling stations. The tell they appeared to pick up is a justification for a marginal call that they'd likely always make, since it is unlikely they would fold.