Making The Most of Poker Talk

It seems like the latest trend is to listen to an iPod while playing live poker, but I urge you not to do this. Instead engage in some of the table talk because you never know what you are going to learn about your opponents current hand strength and how they think about poker in general.

Humans, by nature, love to talk and in doing so they will inadvertently give away valuable information about their thought processes and how they play the game. If you listen in on the table chatter at any live event a common conversation you will hear is people discussing big hands they have won and bad beats they have suffered. This happens whether you are playing in your local casino or taking part in a wsop tournament.

Another thing people love to do is exaggerate their stories to make them more interesting, so try not to pay too much attention to people bragging about their exploits. By all means listen in because you may get some clue as to how experienced a player is but if they start saying they are a regular winner at the $100 games, question why they are sat playing in a $10 re-buy.

You should pay more attention to how they describe hands they have been involved in as this can give a good insight into the sort of player they are. If a player says something along the lines of “I had a pair of aces, went all-in and some donkey called me with a pair of tens and hit a ten on the flop to bust me” then you should assume they are either an amateur player or do not actually pay much attention to table dynamics or what components make up a typical hand.

However, if the same player described a hand by saying, “I had a stack of only eight big blinds and open shoved with a pair of aces from on the button. The big blind, the chip leader, made the call with tens and flopped a set to bust me,” then I would be wary of this player. In those couple of sentences he has shown he is positionally aware, observant of his and his opponents’ chip stacks and also that he realises the big stacked big blind was compelled to call. This type of player is more likely to be a solid winning player than the previous person is.

Keep your ears open, you never know what you might learn.