Quote:
Originally Posted by pevasi
Which tells have you found are worth focusing on?
Essentially none of the ones during a hand. I'll give a single example at the end.
Fundamentally, you should work on your game and make the best decisions. If a decision is close, tells don't have a huge value because the difference in EV between the two decisions is small. If a decision is not close, you have to be absurdly confident in your read to overcome what is a boneheaded play in the absence of a read.
Peoples' overall demeanors are worth reading. Does someone play on a weekly schedule? Do they bring a backpack? What is their motivation for playing? Do they think they are winners? Do they hate you? These things are worth noting because they skew ranges.
People always look to tells like some kind of magic window to see whether someone is bluffing. But a good analogy would be like weather and climate - a tell won't give you the weather tomorrow, but a bunch of tells added up will give you the climate (the number of sunny days you'll get over the year).
The single counterexample is probably when my neighbor on the right was playing Angry Birds. He did this thing where if he was going to fold preflop, he'd keep playing (including starting a new level) while other people acted. If he had a borderline hand, he'd keep playing that level, but wouldn't start a new level. And if he wanted to play a hand, he'd pause the level. It took a while to figure this all out, but then one time he started a new level (intended to fold), but when it was folded to him he looked left (he was HJ or CO), and then raised. I realized he had a really weak hand but decided to steal the blinds. So I 3-bet him.
I was totally correct - at showdown, he had 84o.
Unfortunately, I had 3-bet him with a dominated hand.