The Fifth Tell

By Author: suzanne james
Total Articles: 6
Comment this article

Most players who have been at the poker table off and on for several years can remember those great winning hands and those terrible losing hands. As some of the professionals have explained, the amateur who won't get much better is the person who remembers the wins as great play and the losses as bad luck (as opposed to bad play).

One particular winning hand I remember from a casino cash game has stuck with me for a long time. Unfortunately, I was playing with a limited bankroll, due to some personal financial issues, but was still comfortable enough to sit down at a low-stakes game for a couple of hours. I tried to follow my common, general plan of being conservative and playing my good hands to the limit if necessary.

As I look back now, I was the person at this table who exemplified tell #5 from Mike Caro's book. This tell is about waiting and having the patience to sit back until a good hand comes along. A player will give this signal by crossing his or her arms and sitting back in the chair several times during the session. As Caro explains it, the person giving this tell is not 100 percent committed to ...
... a gambling mood. It also shows that the person is winning and is in position to wait for good hands (thus preserving the profit).

This described me perfectly, during this session at least. Caro advises others not to get involved in a pot with this player simply because the signal given is that, when he or she sits forward and takes interest, there is a good chance the poker hand is strong and they are winning. Yet I found two poker players willing to take me on. I'm guessing they didn't think about the tell at all or didn't know about it to start with. As it turns out they not only got involved in a pot with me, they rode it to the end, winning with the river card.

As my playing session came to an end that day, I was down about the same $100 that I had won just a week before. So I was even for those two sessions. The kicker is that, if these two players had been serious students of Caro and his tell book, they may not have played the hands with me. I didn't consciously give them the information. I simply had one of those aha moments when I cracked open the Caro book in a library a few weeks later.

What lesson can we learn from this experience? To use the most accurate poker strategy and the wisest play would have been best for these two. They probably should not have played the hands against me since I played three or four pots in two hours, calculating and betting carefully each time. Of course, these guys each winning about $50 out of my chip stack when they hit on the river. It probably seemed to be a good play for them.

However, not only was I giving them the warning to stay away from the hand because I was strong, I had the percentages in my favor. One fellow hit a flush card on the river. The probability of hitting the flush when the flop is good is about 35 percent, if I remember correctly. I was the favorite and he won. Oh well..I tried to tell him.