How To Spot Tells When Playing Online Poker

In poker, reading and understanding your opponents is just as important as understanding how to play your cards. Each hand you play, you’re trying to get the better of the other players at the table, so understanding their game and predicting how they’ll act is extremely useful. The more information you have about each opponent, the easier it will be to predict their moves and take advantage of them.

In poker, one of the best ways to predict how someone is going to play is to look for tells. A tell is a subtle clue that reveals what a person is thinking. This could be their body language, such as how they sit in their chair, or it might be a small facial expression. When playing online, players give fewer tells, as you can’t see your opponent. However, there are still things you can look out for that reveal information about them.

With online poker games becoming more competitive and challenging than ever, it’s become even more important to spot and recognize tells. Many of these are very subtle, but over time you’ll gain experience in finding and interpreting them. In addition, knowing common tells is a great way to avoid giving them yourself. Here are a few of the most common online poker tells.

Betting Tells

A betting tell is a tell specifically relating to how much your opponent bets. Bet sizes and the manner in which someone bets can reveal a lot about their hand and their strategy. Pay close attention to betting patterns and look out for the following bet types:

Big Overbet

An overbet is any bet that’s larger than the pot. In most cases, an overbet is very unlikely to be a bluff. Most players that overbet do so because they have a strong hand, and they want to force the opposition into folding. They know that anyone who doesn’t fold is likely to lose. For that reason, it’s best to play cautiously when facing an overbet.

Specific Bets

Most bets are a whole number, but occasionally you’ll see a player type in a specific amount, such as $10.78. In these cases, the bet number is likely provided to them by a solver or piece of software that tells them the maximum value bet they can make. If you spot a player doing this, they’re usually not bluffing but will often have a weaker hand that they don’t want to take big risks on.

Timing Tells

The timing of player decisions can also reveal a lot about their potential hand and motives. Look out for the following timing tells as you play:

Check-Instant Call

When a player checks before instantly calling, it’s likely that they have a weak or marginal hand that they’re waiting to see if it improves. The reasoning behind this is a player will typically think a little bit before calling if they have a strong hand.

Tank Checking

In online poker, tanking is used to describe taking a long time to make a decision. If a player takes a long time to act before checking, you can assume that they want to see the next card on the board without committing much to the pot. In other words, they have a weak hand and can easily be encouraged to fold.

Tanking Before a Big Raise

Taking a long time to act before raising big often raises eyebrows at the poker table. Online, it usually means the player is pretending that they’re deep in thought. In all likelihood, that player has a nut hand and is trying to encourage other players to call.