Randy Burgess is a freelance author, a book doctor, a writing consultant, and the author of two other poker books. He was first introduced to poker when he was a newspaper reporter, and after two decades, his favorite cash game is no-limit hold&;em. Carl Baldassarre is an author, an advertising copywriter, and a creative supervisor at the OgilvyOne advertising agency in New York City.

How Important Are Tells in Poker?

What's a tell? Following are a few short examples.

• In his prime, Doyle Brunson was perhaps the most feared no-limit hold'em player alive. But for a brief while he had a habit that would have made him easy prey for a keen-eyed opponent: when he was betting a real hand, he would count his chips before betting them; when he was bluffing, he would push his chips forward without counting them. Brunson's friend and fellow professional Amarillo Slim finally let him in on the secret.

• The most famous tell that never happened has to be Teddy KGB's cracking open of an Oreo cookie whenever he has a monster hand. Of course, you already know this — unless you're one of the 14 poker players on the planet who've never seen the movie Rounders, starring Matt Damon as the hero, Mike McDermott, and John Malkovich as the evil Teddy. In their climactic head-up hold'em duel, Mike finally catches on to the cookie tell and uses the knowledge to not only avoid losing his entire stack against Teddy's baby straight, but to put Teddy on tilt and turn the match around.

• Here's a tell of the sort I've witnessed time and time again, in one form or another. Again the game is hold'em, but instead of high-stakes drama, it's a $4/$8 limit game at a local club. Three average players are going through the motions: two early limpers versus a raiser on the button. The flop comes A-T-2-; both limpers check, the button bets, and only the first limper calls. The turn brings a second Ten — and now the remaining limper flips up the corners of his hole cards to glance at them before again saying "check" in a voice that ever-so-slightly mixes boredom with disgust. The button bets and lo, the limper check-raises! The button is dismayed, but he shouldn't have been: there was no reason whatsoever for the limper to check his hole cards when the second Ten hit — unless he was doing a very bad acting job. If that weren't enough, the extra-bored voice should have been an additional tip-off.

This last example illustrates just why learning to interpret tells is so important, even if like most of us you're never going to star in a poker movie or play in the World Series of Poker. Becoming sensitive to the mélange of body language, acting, gestures, and facial expressions that make up tells can help any good player make fewer mistakes. You'll pay off less often when you're beat, fold less often when you're ahead, and in general develop a keen eye for opportunities either to make or save extra bets.

But it's not enough to grasp the general notion of tells and wing it from there. Poker is far more than just making or picking off bluffs based on your read of other players. You need to understand where tells fit in relation to other poker concepts: pot odds, implied odds, starting hand standards, game-specific strategy and tactics, and more.

The Truth about Tells

If you talk to professional poker players, many will say that movies like Rounders are bunk, and that tells really aren't that important when compared to other aspects of poker. But then, in discussing one hand or another, these same pros will casually mention that spotting a particular tell against a particular opponent helped them decide what to do — whether to bet, check, raise, or fold. So do we have a contradiction here, or not? The answer is, there's truth on both sides. Or to put it another way, tells are both vastly overrated and vastly underrated.

Tells Are Overrated

There are several reasons that tells aren't all they're cracked up to be in the popular imagination, whether that imagination has been fueled by movies such as Rounders or by televised tournaments such as the World Poker Tour or the World Series of Poker.

To start with, most casino poker is limit rather than no-limit, and tells are worth far less in a limit setting. To see why, imagine Mike McDermott and Teddy KGB playing $30/$60 limit hold'em rather than no-limit: Mike wouldn't have cared nearly as much how many Oreos Teddy fondled because his risk at any given point would be only another $60, not his entire stack. Teddy probably would have visited the dentist many times to have cavities filled before Mike caught on.

Another factor is that many of us play not just limit poker, but small-stakes limit poker to boot — games like $5/$10 hold'em or $10/$20 stud at the local club or casino. Such games tend to be loose and multiway, making the correct calculation of percentages more important than nearly any other factor. The prime requirement here isn't an exquisite ability to detect tells, but rather an aggressive odds-based strategy of the sort expounded upon in such newly minted classics as Small Stakes Hold'em: Winning Big with Expert Play, by Ed Miller (see appendix B, "Further Resources," for more information).

Even when it comes to reading opponents, it's more important to be good at reading betting patterns than it is to be good at reading tells. You can't have a poker hand without betting, whereas it's easy for a good player to suppress many, if not all, tells. As an exaggerated example, if you're playing seven-card stud and you know that Joe will always raise if he's got split Aces, but never raise if he has only an Ace-high three-flush, you've got a huge head start in knowing how to play him. I'd much rather have that information than a tell on him.

An additional caution is that if you spend most of your time watching for tells, you're liable to neglect other crucial aspects of your game. And that can make you play worse, not better.

Such considerations apply with equal force to no-limit and tournament poker. In nearly all cases, betting patterns give you the best handle on your opponents; and in nearly all cases, you've got to have a strong knowledge of the odds. For example, if you're short-stacked in a tournament and a big-stack player puts you all-in, you've got to know what hand values you should call with, based purely on the chips in play and the percentage chances of winning — tells have absolutely nothing to do with it.

As tournament pro Daniel Negreanu wrote in Card Player Magazine: "When you hear people talk about 'reading people,' what it really comes down to is reading into your opponent's mind what he is thinking at the moment, and trying to figure out how he would play various situations. ... For the most part, a great player makes his read based on the actual betting that took place, not on facial tics."

Tells Are Underrated

And yet here's that same Daniel Negreanu, from that same Card Player article: "Having said all this [against tells], I should...