Chip and Card Handling

Introduction

Poker has been described by many as being a game of incomplete information and indeed that is absolutely an appropriate description to give. However, many people will take that description a step further and take a look at poker as being not only a game of incomplete information, but also a game where players aim to gain information in order to fill that gap in. Some players are better than others when it comes to filling in those gaps and one method that players will use to fill in such gaps is the method known as detecting tells. A Tell is a subconscious thing that a player does that gives away their hand or at least puts them on a range of hands.

How a player handles their chips or handles their cards often gives away unconscious information about their hand and while the following tells are not concrete for everyone, you will find them to be reasonably reliable where most novice players are concerned. The key is to observe them and see if they are real during hands where you are not in play so that you can then use them later in hands where you are playing.

Chip Tells

There are two primary chip tells, the first of which if players put their smaller denomination chips into the pot. Players sometimes subconsciously associate smaller chips with poorer hands and therefore if their hand is speculative or otherwise a long shot draw, they might go along with it if they have small chips to put into the pot and therefore do not have to break any of their big stacks. Make sure you pay attention to this, especially in tournaments where many different chip denominations can exist in a person’s hand at the same time.

Another tell that a player might have is extremely rare, but also almost perfectly accurate when you see it. Players that are calling-stations will sometimes arrange their chips into big blind stacks ahead of time to save time, not realizing that this is a dead giveaway tell as to the kind of player that they are. Since you are an intermediate poker player, you should be considering what your opponent player types are and if you see players doing this, you can automatically conclude that their biggest poker mistake is calling too much.

Card Tells

The two card tells both have to do with the same thing and that is if your opponent has a flush draw or a flush. When the flop comes out with two cards of the same suit and a player calls your bet, then you can be pretty sure that they have some sort of draw if they do not check their cards again (this is also true if there is an obvious straight draw on the board). However, if three suited cards come on the flop and they look back to check their hand, you can be very sure that they do not have a suited hand, because players generally remember suits when their hands are suited and generally forget them when their hands are not.