Author: T

A word of caution

The very fact of committing the above observations to print may in itself change the behaviour of players and indeed, for purposes of deception, sophisticated players will often try to mimic the behaviours of less sophisticated players. Sometimes, for instance, a player would make a bet purposely using small denomination chips when holding very strong hands. This is done just on the off-chance that a more sophisticated player will erroneously make the sort of deductions which we gave in Example 1. If no one makes this sort of a deduction – well, you have lost nothing by trying.
On the whole, the above chip-handling behaviours are only applicable to less sophisticated players. However, this is not always the case and sometimes you will see established players making fundamental errors. By revealing these chip-handling behaviours, I have, in a way, ‘broken the magician’s code’ and told you how the card-reading trick is done. However, these are only a small sample of the range of chip-handling behaviours you will observe at the poker table. The challenge, for us all, is to interpret the behaviours and build up a repertoire of new card-reading tricks or analytical techniques.

Card-Handling Behaviours

Again you should be very attentive to how and when your opponents pick up and look at their cards. On the very simplest level, players are so careless sometimes that they pick up their cards in such a way that their neighbours cannot help but see what they are holding. These players are usually so poor that it is easy to determine what they are holding anyway, so I normally tell them to hide their cards. Sometimes, players pick up their cards and look at them as soon as they get them, whilst others pick them up just before it is their turn to act. Just one example will be sufficient to let you know how careful observation and deduction can be used in ‘reading’ or determining what cards a player holds.

Example: Have I got a heart or not?
Often the flop in Hold ‘Em will contain three cards all of the same suit, say KH, 7H, 4H . When this happens one or more players may look at their hands again. The reason for this is that the player may have one card of the suit and has looked for the second time to make sure. It is equally likely that the player has an ace but has forgotten what suit it is. In the case above, if the player has something like AH, 4S then this is a reasonable hand, but if he has AH, KS then this is a more powerful hand. In both cases, if you have a flush already made and bet into the player they will more often than not call you. Some rash players even consider these ‘drawing’ hands to be good enough to bet, raise or re-raise with.
It is possible that a player will have something like AS, KC against the KH, 7H, 4H flop, in which case he should proceed with extreme caution because if this hand is out against a made flush there is practically no chance of the hand improving to win.
By watching what the player does in this sort of circumstance (i.e. the three-flush flop) you can obtain a very good impression of what cards he holds and play your own hand better as a result. So, for instance, if you are the player holding the AS, KC against the KH, 7H, 4H flop, you might well be prepared to proceed with the hand if you see your sole opponent have a second look at his cards. In this case, the chances are high that your opponent has a four-flush and that you are a percentage favourite in the pot (you would have an approximate 65 per cent chance of winning).
Incidentally, it is almost never the case that a player will pick up and look at their cards a second time if they already have the flush made. This is because if a player has two cards of the same suit he will remember what the suit is and even novice players will realise that it is giving the game away to look at their hand. This is why if you do have the flush on the flop and you are playing against sophisticated players it is sometimes deceptive to look at your cards a second time, pretending that you have only got four cards to the flush.

Chip and Card Behaviours

One brief example will illustrate how chip- and card-handling behaviours can combine to give you clues about what a player holds.

Example: I’ve got to protect my hand here!
Many players protect their hands from the danger of the dealer accidentally throwing it into the discards by the simple expedient of placing a chip or coin on top of the two-hole cards. Indeed some players even have special (perhaps’lucky’) chips which they use solely for this purpose. If such a player ‘forgets’ to put the chip on top of his cards it could be because the cards are not worth protecting. In general, when this happens the player is going to pass the cards in any case, so there is not much useful information to be drawn from this sort of observation.
Sometimes novices or poor players who don’t have this habit of putting a chip on top of their cards will suddenly do so.You might even see the player take a whole stack of chips and pile them on top of his cards. When this happens, the player has almost invariably got a very good hand indeed (my money would be on two aces or two kings). Players in this circumstance may subconsciously get a feeling of paranoia that the dealer will rob them of a wonderful money-making opportunity by carelessly throwing their hand into the discards. Indeed there may be a different explanation for different players exhibiting this behaviour, but the important thing to bear in mind is that it does happen and reasonably frequently. If you observe a poor player piling chips onto his cards my advice is to pass unless you have the nuts.
However, as has been stressed at many points in this book, poker is a complex game and many players show feral cunning in the moves they make. So you should not take anything at face value. For instance, relatively sophisticated players who know about this type of card-protection behaviour may well stack chips on top of a worthless hand and then try to bluff you out of the pot.
More likely though is that a sophisticated player (let’s call her Player X) will attempt to set someone up in the hope of winning a big pot. Player X will pick another intelligent player as her quarry and, knowing that this player is observant, will always pile chips on top of her good hands. Player X will make a point of ensuring that the quarry/victim sees the good hand on completion on each occasion. This type of behaviour will be reinforced by constant repetition (perhaps even over a period of a few nights), until Player X considers that her victim has the strongly held belief that ‘Player X always piles chips on her good hands’. Then remarkably, when the two are in a big pot together, Player X will neglect to pile chips on her blockbuster hand and as a result will win a lot of extra chips from her hapless victim. Of course, this sort of trick should only work once against a good player.
This is only one example of how good players can set other players up for a ‘coup de grace’ (or perhaps it could be called a ‘coup de theatre’, because of the dramatic effect). So I would urge you to look out for this type of situation yourself.
Why does Player X pick another intelligent player as the victim? Why not a poor player? The reason is clear. It is because subtle play is lost upon poor players. They either don’t notice or, if they do, it goes right over their heads. It seems like a paradox but you cannot do anything tricky against poor players and you should think carefully before trying to bluff a poor player. We are not saying don’t try to bluff a poor player, just bear in mind that bluffs work best against intelligent players.

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Example 2: Little piles, little blinds
When the blinds for a tournament have reached, for example, the 600-unit stage, you will often observe a player building his chips into piles of exactly 600 units to make it easier to call the first bet. Then later when the blinds go up to 800 units this player will change the piles into stacks of 800-units value. This tells you something about the player. They are likely to be the type that calls much more often than they should, that is, in poker terminology, to be a’ calling station’. You cannot chase them out of the pot no matter how high your bet. It is best not to try stealing a pot or bluffing this type of player because the percentage chance is very high that you will be called. Conversely, if you have a reasonable hand you can try a bet because they are likely to call with a lesser hand.

Example 3: Don’t hide your chips
Often at the poker table you will hear the cry ‘Don’t hide your chips.’ This refers to the practice that some players have of hiding their high denomination chips behind several piles of smaller denomination chips. The explanation for this is often that the players hiding the chips are, both figuratively and actually, protecting their chips. This type of player tends to be ‘tight’ (that is, plays only very high value hands). So, if this type of player is in a pot with you be very careful. The percentage chance is high that the player will have a good hand.

Example 4: Big jar, small jars
As opposed to the type of player described in Example 1 who like to have small piles of high denomination chips, there are others who like to have big piles of small denomination chips. If the card room supervisor wants to change their small chips ‘up’ for those of bigger denomination, they want to keep the small value chips, ‘because it looks more’. They seem to think that large piles of chips are more intimidating and, to some extent, I agree.
The French psychologist, Piaget, did a series of experiments with young children where he asked them to compare the quantities of liquids in glass jars of various sizes. In one version of the experiment, two of the glass jars were tall and each contained the same fixed quantity of liquid. There were also two smaller glass jars into which Piaget poured the contents of one of the larger jars. Piaget asked the children whether the tall jar, which remained full, contained the same quantity of liquid as the two smaller jars. His findings were that, in the early stages of development, children considered it natural for the quantity of the liquid to vary with the shape and dimensions of the containers into which it was poured. In other words, they did not have a fully developed concept of the conservation of matter or quantity.
Piaget was interested in the developing thought processes of children, so it would be rash to compare the cognitive processing of supposedly sophisticated poker players to that of small children. Still, it is possible that there may be perceptual processes which might make players perceive tall stacks as containing more chips than several smaller stacks.
A tall stack of chips in front of a player does seem to look more daunting than several small stacks, even though the total value might be the same in both cases. This is particularly so if a player has the small stacks one behind the other. There is no real empirical evidence for this observation but it often seems that players tend to be less inclined to bet into an opponent with a tall intimidating stack or stacks of chips in front of him than they would be to bet into anyone who has stacked the chips into several small piles. Although this is tentative advice, I do think there is merit in stacking your chips high.

Example 5: Macho man
I have never observed this behaviour in women players hence the title. Sometimes a man, usually an inexperienced player, will call a bet, or more often a raise, in such a way that there will be a cracking or snapping made by the chips as he bangs them into the pot. This usually happens after he pauses for thought. This behaviour is almost always a sign that he has a medium-strength hand. If it happens before the flop, in a raised Hold ‘Em pot, this behaviour could indicate a fair hand such as KD, QS or AC, 10S or even 7D, 7C. Or, if it happens after a flop of say KS, 6H, 3H, it again would indicate a fair hand, perhaps KC, 9S or KC, 8S. This behaviour seems to me to be a non-verbal statement meaning ‘I have a good hand and I am going to make a stand’ (usually the player is mistaken in thinking he has a good hand). The player is also making a statement along the lines of ‘you are not going to get away with a bluff against me’.
If in the former situation you are the one who raised with a proper raising hand, such as QS, QH, then you have a big advantage because you are better able to put your opponent on a probable hand. If a higher card than your pair comes, you are in a much better position to gauge from his reaction whether it ‘hits’ one of his hole cards or not. Equally, in the latter case, if you hold say AH, KD (when the flop was K-6-3), then you can bet with impunity.
A characteristic of this macho-type of player is often that they do not like to be check-raised. They tend to take it as an insult or perhaps even as an affront to their manhood, and they almost always call if they have a medium-strength hand. In our opinion this is one of the few situations where it is advantageous to check-raise in a pot-limit or no-limit game.

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