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Gaming Guru
Poker Tells Take Your Performance Beyond the Odds17 April 2004
Poker and blackjack are two casino games that can be beaten by skillful players. The way you beat blackjack is by having knowledge of the remaining cards and playing all the odds out to the "nth" degree. To beat poker though, while playing the odds does matter, the most important thing is to play the player. Here's the difference. When you play blackjack, the dealer doesn't know what card she has in the hole. So you play your hand assuming that every other unknown card has an equal chance to be there. Combine that with larger bets when lots of high cards are left and you have the upper hand in the overall game. That's playing it by the odds. Now when you're playing poker, things are quite different. In poker you should actually raise some hands against certain players and fold that same hand against other players. Playing the odds is fine, but in the end, psychology more so than the odds separates poker winners from poker losers. Why is this so? Since a blackjack dealer has no idea what she has and has no stake in the outcome, every dealer plays a given hand the same exact way. So the only thing left for you to do is figure out all her odds. In poker you have much more than that available to you. That's because no two poker players play a given hand quite the same way. You'd need to recognize this fact, and pay attention to how each individual tends to play a particular type of hand. If you don't, you'll fall behind the game because everybody's trying to recognize how you play. The player who recognizes the most about his opponents' tendencies is the guy who usually gets the money. So how do you recognize these tendencies? Watch the hands play out when you're not in the pot. That's when your mind is free to notice everybody's personal behavior. Throughout the course of a poker game, players will make several "artificial" moves designed to elicit a certain reaction. If you can recognize the true intention of these moves, you've turned those moves into "tells" and can profit from that extra information. The next time you play poker, see if you notice any of the following common tells being given by your opponents.
Recognizing these and many other tells transcends the long term odds. They narrow it down to what's happening right here -- in this hand -- right now. This article is provided by the Frank Scoblete Network. Melissa A. Kaplan is the network's managing editor. If you would like to use this article on your website, please contact Casino City Press, the exclusive web syndication outlet for the Frank Scoblete Network. To contact Frank, please e-mail him at fscobe@optonline.net. Recent Articles
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