Using Your Opponents’ Words Against Them
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People ask me questions about talking tells all the time. “While I was thinking about calling a big bet, my opponent kept saying, ‘You should fold.’ Should I have believed him or not?”
It’s a difficult question to answer because the meaning varies from player to player. Some players will say “You should fold,” when they want a call. Some will say it when they want a fold. And some will switch it up. I frequently just ignore statements like this one because the information isn’t reliable enough for me to act upon.
When in doubt, ignore anything that comes out of your opponents’ mouths. Don’t let it affect your decision-making. If you aren’t sure about what something means, and despite that you go ahead and use it to make your decision, you’ve been manipulated.
I’ve learned about a few things I can do or say that tend to make average players somewhat more likely to call on the end. When I say one of these things to a player, the last thing I want them to do is to ignore it. I want them to try to use my words against me, because most people do it wrong, and I end up getting more calls.
So if your opponent says something to you and you’re tempted to treat it like a puzzle and try to decode it, STOP! You’re being manipulated.
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Tags: interpreting chatter, no-limit-holdem, poker, poker chatter, tells
That’s amusing, last night we had two people at my table doing that every hand they were in, and nearly every time they ende up showing down the hand that they were asking. ie, “You got nines?” they had ‘em.