Conceal, Don't Reveal!
There are two ways that nonverbal behaviors (tells) can impact your financial wellbeing at the tables. You can make money by using your opponents’ tells to play more effectively against them.
You can save money when opponents can’t use your own tells to play more effectively against you. Which brings me to Navarro’s Axiom: To save your money, learn to conceal and not revealtm. Even if you are a poor reader of other people’s tells, you can still preserve a lot of your chips if you learn to conceal the majority of your tells from other players at the table. The less you reveal, the less likely it is that others will be able to take advantage of you.
No one wants to give anything away, especially his chips, so why make it easy for the other players to accumulate yours? Are you the kind of person that waits till everyone is looking at you before looking at your cards? Why? Why make it easy for people to spot your tells when you should be doing everything to make it difficult for them to read you.
As I go around the country watching people play, the first thing that stands out is how much information they give away. My own students at Camp Hellmuth always emphasize that they want to read the other players; meanwhile they are giving away so much that their opponents can read. Any tells that you can cut out of your own play will go a long way to enhancing your winning chances. I would rather see you lose because the cards did not go your way than because every time you bluffed you placed your thumbs in your pockets (more about this later).
So, how do we fix this personal information leakage? By adopting a robotic approach to your table image:
I’d like you to imagine a robotic arm at an auto assembly plant. Time after time, day after day, month after month, year after year, it continues to do the same thing the same way. Its performance is a masterful depiction of relentless repetition, a behavior that never changes, an action that recurs over and over and over again. An observer could get bored pretty quickly watching such a machine. It wouldn’t take long before he had seen enough and shifted his attention elsewhere.
This is exactly what we want to shoot for at the poker table. I want you to learn and adopt a highly stylized, repetitive, information-concealing routine for presenting yourself and handling your cards at the table. If this can be accomplished, you will gain two tremendous advantages when you play poker: First, you will minimize the number of tells you give away at the table; and secondly, people will stop looking at you because there is nothing to see.
What I am recommending is that you develop a robotic (automatic, repetitive) approach to handling your cards and wagers that is consistent and conceals your nonverbal behaviors. You want to become so repetitive that you fly “under the radar” of human interest. You want people to grow tired of looking at you because there’s nothing to pick up, because nothing has changed, because they’ve seen it all before.
Here is a step-by-step guide to concealing, not revealing, tells at the table:
When you sit down at the table, take time to get adjusted in your seat. You will want to assume a posture, sitting position, and distance from the table that is easy and comfortable to maintain for long periods of time. Your goal will be to maintain your sitting posture and position with as little deviation as possible. Don’t splay out, trying to act “cool.” Most people don’t last very long this way and you become more of a billboard the more open you are.
Arrange your chips in neat stacks so they can easily be seen and totaled by you, the dealer, or another player (by looking). Maintain a neat chip stack throughout play. Don’t be intimidated into counting. If someone asks, the dealer will do it. Don’t fall prey to this attempt to read you.
When you receive your hole cards, you will want to look at them the same way every time. I recommend you look at your cards with your head low. This gives away less information. Try to see the cards without actually picking them up, so as not to give anything away with additional hand movements. Once you observe your cards, don’t look up; continue to look down. Try to retain the same facial expression regardless of the cards you observe. Also, try to look at your hole cards for the same amount of time each time a hand is dealt.
Look at your cards when there are other distractions, such as other players looking at their cards. You don’t want nine sets of eyes all trained on you. The fewer opponents watching you, the better.
When you’ve finished looking at your hole cards, cup your hands together, one atop the other, and bring them up to your mouth level. Then sit up with your elbows slightly out and your hands over your mouth. Maintaining this position will make it difficult for an opponent to observe your eyes or detect any mouth or nose tells. At the same time, you’re blocking most of the area of the neck that might reveal information about what you have, and, by keeping your hands cupped in a specific position, you are reducing tells that involve your hands and hand movements to other areas of your body and/or the table.
Strive to retain the same posture and distance from the table throughout the hand. This is a good position from which to act. You can calm down, think, analyze, strategize, and act, while revealing little. Train yourself to observe from this position. Just because your head is low doesn’t mean you can’t observe the players around you.
When you bet, know what you’re going to do before you do it. Keep your verbal announcements short and consistent over the length of your play. Always move your chips into the pot in the same manner with a simple statement such as “call,” “raise,” “reraise,” or “all in.” Once you’ve moved your chips to the pot, immediately return to your standard hands-cupped-over-the-mouth sitting position.
Do not make extraneous movements in any part of your body – your legs, torso, hands, arms, face – during play. If you need to shift in your seat, scratch your neck, yawn, lick your lips, or move about and stretch to get more comfortable, do so between hands or during hands you are not playing. Get up and stretch when not in play. Built up stress will leak out when you’re under pressure or excited, because your body needs to dump adrenaline.
Try to maintain the same facial expression throughout play. You are not there to win a popularity contest; you are there to win.
Remain as non-communicative as possible at the table, both during and between hands. Do not engage in conversation or eye contact with other players unless absolutely necessary. Remember, your verbal and eye behavior can provide an opponent with valuable tells.
By retaining the same posture, table distance, and hand behavior, you reduce the likelihood of giving off tells. At each of the three Hellmuth Camps, and in local play, students who have adopted this methodology agree that they played far better and were more successful at the tables.
Repeat the same behavior, hand after hand after hand. This is critical to minimizing your tells and maximizing the chances that other players will soon ignore you and turn their attention to other opponents with more interesting body language.
Lastly, give the conceal, don’t reveal strategy a try for at least a few games. Notice how much calmer you are and how you’re able to observe without giving so much away. Something as simple as placing your thumbs in your pants or suit coat pockets may not mean anything to you, but to the cognoscenti, it means a lot (weakness, trepidation, humility). By adopting a robotic methodology, you will avoid pitfalls (such as thumb displays of weakness), many of which you were not even aware.
So, there you have it: a step-bystep strategy for concealing, not revealing at the poker table. Does it make for good television? No. If everyone acted robotically, most viewers would reach for the remote to change channels. Is it appropriate for low-stakes, Saturday night poker games among friends? Not really, because fun and camaraderie are probably more critical than profit in such a setting. But remember, if your goal at the table is to accumulate money – not Oscars or hours of entertainment – then, if restricting your movements means you are preserving your assets, so be it.
Next month, I’ll conclude my discussion of concealing, not revealing by explaining how you can assess and monitor the effectiveness of your table image and whether you should consider using “props” (sunglasses, hats, etc.) to further reduce the chances of exposing tells to your opponents. Until then, practice concealment and remember: If you give away tells, you’re going to end up giving away money as well.
Joe Navarro is a 25-year veteran of the FBI’s National Security Division. You can read his book Phil Hellmuth Presents Read ’em and Reap (HarperCollins), available at all major online and brick and mortar booksellers. Joe welcomes readers’ questions at his navarropoker.com website. Dr. Marvin Karlins holds a PhD in Psychology from Princeton University and is currently Professor of Management at the University of South Florida’s School of Business. An avid poker player, Professor Karlins enjoys answering inquiries at mkarlins@aol.com.
