Tips and Tricks

Practise your poker face

The best poker trick is: "guess" what cards your opponents have, but do not give away the cards in your own hands. Therefore, these tips of the experts

Pokerface

Of course you do not want not to let your opponents know what cards you have. Thus you have to keep down your emotions - positive and negative – as much as possible. You are not only doing the this with your face, but with your whole body. Common example of the wrong "body language": inexperienced players hold their breath when they bluff. American poker players call this "tell": a signal that they recognize quickly and thus that tells something about someone’s cards.

Eyes do not lie

It is always worth to notice the eyes of the opponents. Good example: almost everybody has the impulse to look longer to a high card then to a low card. Also looking someone straight in the eyes ("stare him down") is a classical trick of the experienced players, because they know that someone rarely can remain look back when he "lies". Therefore: those sunglasses really take effect.

Tells

People often think that poker players wear sunglasses, so they don’t give away "tells" to their opponents. This is partially true – but it is not the whole truth. The truth is that we wear sunglasses, because we don’t want to show our opponent that we are looking at them!

The opposite is true

Everybody acts, but poker players overdo. If an opponent bets uninterested and not too enthusiastic, then you almost certainly know he has good cards. The other way around, someone who suddenly raises his voice while he bets higher, is probably pretending he has good cards. But look out, the real experts know all these tricks, and act the other way around. They are acting uninterested if they have good cards. There is nothing for it then develop your "radar" well for this kind of situations, and to learn to distinguish the real and the played "tells".

Poker tip

People who are not so familiar with the game, often think that per definition a good player must act. They think that the "good poker" tend to act strong in case of weakness and act weak when they are strong. Although sometimes this simple strategy will be successful against bad players, good and/or experienced players simply look through it. Against them, you must think and act on a deeper level, if you want at least stand firm during the game.

Recognize the opponent’s type

A simple tip of the advanced players to recognize what kind of opponent you have in front of you. Someone who arranges his chips neatly, will probable be a careful, defensive player. He whose chips lie on a large unorganized pile, is probably a loose, more aggressive player. Anyway, naturally it is wise to pay attention to your opponent’s play, and now and then - when they won or just lost – reverse the film.