Body Language Tells in Poker - Science of People Success! Now check your email to confirm your subscription. There was an error submitting your subscription. Please try again. Get FREE tools to increase your social influence GET IT! Body Language Tells in Poker If you want to be a master poker player, you have got to master your body language–and know how to be a master at reading tells. I get asked all the time in my body language and human lie detection trainings if nonverbal science works in poker. And the answer: Heck yeah! Body language is essential for poker players! Nonverbal science adds a whole new dimension to the game. In this post I have gathered quotes from of the top Poker players around the world, some interesting stats and tips for poker players on reading tells. Poker Experts Talk Body Language: Zach Elwood – author of Reading Poker Tells “There are certain things I tend to look for in inexperienced live players – things like stillness and movement; as a general rule people who are relaxed will show more movement in spots as opposed to someone who is anxious, they are a little more still and tense. This is also usually when there is a significant bet involved.

Someone who is relaxed might show more looseness in how they gather their chips when they put in a bit, or how they place the bet, or after the bet. Their eyes might move around more. Whereas this is reversed in players who are bluffing. It’s about getting a comparison point for that player and knowing when a spot would be a good point to compare. Another thing I tend to look for is bet timing. There is a very general tendency for people to bet more quickly with a 3-bet/continuation bet/preflop bet with a weaker hand, and take more time with a premium hand. For example if someone immediately puts in a raise as soon as it gets round to them, because they know they will usually raise in that spot with any two cards. That same player might take a few seconds to make it look like they have a decision with a strong hand.” Here are Zach’s selected poker tells based on nonverbal: When players buy into a game in a low-key manner, hiding their money, you can expect them to play conservatively. Conversely, if they flash their money, calling for chips with a flair, they’ll usually play recklessly.

When you use this knowledge against players you’ve never encountered before, you get a profitable head start. Unless subsequent events make you revise this first impression, call less often and bluff more often against the player who hid his money; call more often and bluff less often against the player who bought in conspicuously. This tell won’t be 100 percent accurate, but it’s right most of the time. And that gives you an instant advantage against unknown opponents. Players who look at their cards and then gaze away from the action are usually intending to bet or raise. They have strong hands. That wayward gaze falls somewhere between an act and instinctive behavior. That opponent is deliberately trying to seem uninterested and, for you, this usually means trouble! Any seemingly disgusted or reluctant wager means a strong hand. The player is trying to convey uncertainty about the bet. But if it actually were a weak hand, that opponent would do everything possible to disguise the fact. Unless you hold a very strong hand, you should usually fold when an opponent seems unsure or hesitant about betting. When it’s your turn to act, if opponents are slightly reaching toward their chips or even moving their hands almost imperceptibly in that direction, they’re trying to discourage your bet.

This gives you the opportunity to profitably bet medium-strong hands you might otherwise have checked. Mike Caro – author of Caro’s Book of Tells: The Body Language of Poker “A player gains an advantage if he observes and understands the meaning of another player’s tell, particularly if the poker tell is unconscious and reliable. Sometimes a player may even fake a tell, hoping to induce his opponents to make poor judgments in response to the false poker tell. After all, poker is a game of deception. The general rule is that weakness usually means strength, and strength usually means weakness. But, you must decide how much weight to give a tell at any given moment. If you make learning tells fun, it will be an ever-changing, exciting part of your poker arsenal.” David Sasseman – Creator of Pokerology “Many think that nervousness is a sign of a weak hand. If the nervousness is in fact an act, then all too often the player is holding a monster. Imitations of real nervousness are done badly. It is usually greatly exaggerated and you can easily detect when someone is really nervous. Should an opponent act nervous in a critical game situation, this is usually an indication of a strong hand.

A player’s breathing pattern can be a very meaningful tell. His breathing changes are almost never intentional. The closer you are to the player, the better this tell will work for you. Shallow breathing, or an attempt to avoid breathing loudly is a sign of a weak hand. THE QUICK GLANCE AT THE CHIPS This is probably the most valuable unconscious tell. If a player quickly looks at his chips then looks away, he probably wants to bet. Alternately, he might also take a quick look at his opponent’s chips. It is important that he does not feel he’s being under observation. THE QUICK GLANCE AT THE CARDS Particularly for beginners, this is a reliable tell. The tell here is an unconscious one, brief look at the player’s own cards. If, for example, the flop brings 3 hearts and the player looks at his cards, it is unlikely he has the flush. This is because with an off-suit hand, a beginner usually takes no notice of the suits at first glance. Only with a suited hand will they remember the suit. Thus you can often assume here that they have at most one heart.” The Power of Body Language Want to get a nonverbal edge?

Check out our Power of Body Language course where we teach you how to detect hidden emotions, read nonverbal micromessages and power body language: &nbsp;</p> <p> All Rights Reserved + COPYRIGHT 2014 Science of People, LLC About Vanessa Van Edwards Vanessa Van Edwards is a published author and behavioral investigator. She is a Huffington Post columnist and her courses and research has been featured on CNN, Forbes, Business Week and the Wall Street Journal. As a published Penguin author, Vanessa regularly speaks and appears in the media to talk about her research. She is a sought after consultant and speaker . Leave a Reply Frequently Asked Questions about PokerSnowie What does PokerSnowie stand for? Depending on the context, PokerSnowie may either stand for the AI (the "brain") or the actual software tool that is powered by the brain. PokerSnowie is the name behind the concept of increasing game proficiency, overall gaming ecosystem health and entertainment value using mathematical modelling and artificial intelligence (neural networks) to develop the strongest, most balanced and ultimately un-exploitable gameplay possible. We want to give everyone the chance to improve their game in an effective yet responsible way for the overall good of the gaming community.

We've already put our ambition into practice in the form of BackgammonSnowie, which showed fantastic results and a lot of support from novice and professional Backgammon players alike. With poker increasing in popularity, in addition to the fact that it's a similarly skill-based game with some elements of luck, it was the next logical step in our progression, and resulted in PokerSnowie. PokerSnowie is a very strong No Limit Hold'em poker player. Its knowledge is based on artificial intelligence neural networks and mathematical models, and its experience is the result of trillions of hands of gameplay against itself over the course of a decade. PokerSnowie has no expert knowledge built in and its goal is to develop a perfectly balanced and un-exploitable strategy, making it the perfect partner to help you develop a long term winning strategy. What is PokerSnowie? PokerSnowie is a very strong No Limit Hold'em poker player. Its knowledge is based on artificial intelligence neural networks and mathematical models, and its experience is the result of trillions of hands of gameplay against itself over the course of a decade.

PokerSnowie has no expert knowledge built in and its goal is to develop a perfectly balanced and un-exploitable strategy, making it the perfect partner to help you develop a long term winning strategy. But isn't the human element responsible for world-class playing ability? There are occasions where using detailed knowledge of your opponents can pay off in the short term. For example, it's easy to beat a 'Rock, Paper, Scissors' player if he always picks scissors. However, taking this approach also leaves you vulnerable to being exploited yourself by opponents who know what you're doing. Play perfect strategy and even if your opponents know, they still have no counter-strategy against you and you're guaranteed to be a winning player in the long run. How is PokerSnowie different to statistical tools or peer-based training/coaching programs? Statistical tools such as HUDs (or heads-up displays) only provide figures on gameplay in order to expose and exploit weakness, and they do not take actual game strategy into account, making them unreliable for developing a long term winning strategy and improving your own game.

Peer-based training/coaching programs are based on the opinions and approaches used by highly rated players, but they also inherently contain a lot of subjectivity, which can result in adopting habits that may be detrimental to the development of your game. The problem with subjective advice is that it may not work for everyone and it opens up the possibility of being exploited yourself simply by taking this approach. PokerSnowie is focussed on giving anyone the chance to learn a balanced gameplay that cannot be exploited. The overall aim of PokerSnowie is to provide you with the best possible way of improving your game proficiency, rather than looking for weak points in the gameplay of others. PokerSnowie's products enable you to analyse every aspect of your game, pin-point specific errors, provide you with valuable advice on more efficient alternatives, rate your play in terms of numerous variables such as equity, error rate, balance rate and more, and also give you the perfect environment in which to put it all into practice: by playing against PokerSnowie itself! There are simply no other tools or training/coaching options out there that give you so many real, practical, measurable – and proven! - ways to improve your game. What products are powered by PokerSnowie?

PokerSnowie currently powers 2 products: the PokerSnowie software and the PreflopAdvisor , the last of which is available for free and is a great way to experience PokerSnowie's optimal gameplay capabilities. Who are PokerSnowie's products for? In a word? Anyone! The beauty of PokerSnowie's products is they're designed to improve the poker proficiency of NL Hold'em players of any level by pin-pointing specific elements of your game that could be improved AND giving you the best possible practical advice on how to do so. I have a website and I would like to sell PokerSnowie, do you have an affiliates program? Yes, the PokerSnowie affiliate program provides a unique way for your website, or app, to link to PokerSnowie and earn 30% commissions on qualifying sales. Simply join as an affiliate partner, direct traffic to PokerSnowie and we will handle everything else. You can sign up here . My PokerSnowie subscription expired, can I still use PokerSnowie? PokerSnowie can be used only if you have an active paid subscription or a free trial. Can I test PokerSnowie if I don't have supported hands? Yes, now you can.

We've made available a number of sample hands which you can import into PokerSnowie to test the product. Click here to download those sample hands. Once downloaded unzip the file and it is now ready to be imported into PokerSnowie. I cannot launch PokerSnowie while running PokerStars or Full Tilt PokerSnowie is strictly a post hand analysis tool and we encourage users not to use it whilst playing online at any site. As a matter of fact we have designed our product to automatically close or not even start when it detects a running instance of the PokerStars or Full Tilt software. In order to run PokerSnowie, any instance of Pokerstars or Full Tilt must be closed. Is PokerSnowie's style maximum EV at all different stakes? No, it is not. Especially if you play at the lower levels you could win additionally by exploiting specific weaknesses of your opponents. However, if you execute the PokerSnowie strategy perfectly you would still win because the opponents make a lot of errors, from which you would collect EV. What does EV stand for? EV stands for "Expected Value". When browsing through your hands you will notice that PokerSnowie rates your play based on the EV.

In most situations, a particular play exists that has the highest EV. There are also situations where different plays, for example a raise and a call, have the same positive EV. Or there are situations where both a fold and a bluff-raise have the same neutral EV. The EV is measured in big blinds. I think PokerSnowie plays way too tight preflop. Why is that? Regarding the ranges preflop: It is clear that against weak human opposition the opening ranges can be much wider. On the other hand, against very strong opponents the ranges of PokerSnowie are optimal. It's also important to note that rake is incorporated in the model. Therefore, at lower stakes (where the rake is proportionally bigger) PokerSnowie plays tighter than at higher stakes. Does PokerSnowie adapt to players' tendencies? No, it does not. PokerSnowie plays independently of the characteristics of a specific opponent. So it does not take into account HUD stats or the skill level of opponents. Instead, it basically plays a game of super high stakes, where it considers that the opponents are all very strong, too. What is the error rate? The error rate gives a score for how well the session was played.

It is independent of the actual outcome and only based on the skill of the player. For every betting round, the error rate sums up the EV cost of all errors, divided by the number of moves played. So the smaller the error rate the better. Please note that the sample size needs to be big enough to get a significant error rate. Usually 5K to 10K of imported hands is enough to get a stable error rate. Very strong high stakes players have an error rate of around 7 in ring games and 5 in heads-up games. Less experienced players and beginners often have an error rate of over 20. What are Blunders? A blunder is a costly error. The threshold for when an error is considered to be a blunder can be set within the options menu. By default the threshold is set to an EV loss of 2.0 big blinds. The link 'Browse your blunders' lets you conveniently browse through all big errors, so that you can efficiently learn to avoid your biggest errors. What does the profit and loss page indicate? This page gives you an overview about the outcome of the session. The profit is calculated disregarding rake, with rake then deducted from that number.

The total profit is split into showdown and non-showdown hands. What are Error details? Here the error rate is broken down into the four betting rounds. You can quickly see in which round you gave up most EV. Note that you can click on the number of blunders and errors for each round. This automatically sets the filter so that you can browse through this error type. What does the balance page indicate? The error rate measures the EV given up. You may, however, have a good error rate and a poor balance as a result of the weak/medium/strong ratio. The balance page shows you how balanced your play has been. The 'Call' block compares your number of calls with the number of calls PokerSnowie would have played, split by each betting round. 100% is the perfect value, a number higher than 100% means that you called too often and a number lower than 100% means you didn't call enough. The 'Bet' block does the same thing for all your bets, but split by bets with weak (as a bluff), medium and strong (for value) hands.

Again 100% is best, but additionally it is important to have as similar a score as possible for each weak / medium / strong bracket. 100% weak, 100% medium and 100% strong is best, but for example 150% weak and 150% strong is a lot better than 150% weak and 50% strong. 150%/150% indicates a too high frequency of betting, but at least the ratio between weak and strong hands is right. 150%/50% is very bad, the balance is quite wrong and the opponent could easily exploit this. The 'Raise' block has the same structure as the 'Bet' block. Note that you can click on the numbers below the percentages, which is the number of times the player actually played that type of move. This automatically sets the filter so that you can browse through these specific actions. What are playing stats? Several statistics are shown. When possible, the stats of the player are compared with the stats PokerSnowie would have produced given the same situations. That way, it is easy to see how the player should adjust.

VPIP: Voluntarily put money in pot Number of times the player voluntarily put money in the pot, divided by the total number of hands. PFR: Preflop raise Number of times the player raised at least once during preflop, divided by the total number of hands. Aggression factor Number of times the player made a bet or raise, divided by the total number of calls. Fold facing bet Number of times a player folded to a bet or a raise, divided by the total number of situations where the player was facing a bet. SFSB: Saw flop from small blind Number of times the player was in small blind position and was still in the hand on the flop, divided by the total number of hands sitting in small blind position. WMSF: Won money when seeing the flop Number of times the player won money when seeing the flop, divided by the total number of times the player saw the flop. WTSD: Went to showdown What does the opponents’ page indicate? The same statistics are combined for all opponents on the 'Playing stats' page. For the meaning and the definition of the stats, have a look at the playing stats . What is the preflop advice table?

The preflop advice table is a great tool to visualize PokerSnowie's preflop strategy in one glance. The table displays one field for each of the 169 different hole card combinations: the diagonal covers the pocket pairs, the upper right triangle the suited cards and the lower left triangle the off-suited cards. The colour code indicates the advised action, green for raise, yellow for call and white for fold. If a number is displayed in the field, this is the percentage of times this hand should be raised. It is possible that some hole cards combinations are not in the preflop range anymore. If you have previously raised and it is your turn again, you would not be holding 72o, for example, because you would have folded it already. Those fields are greyed out. However, it is still possible to see how PokerSnowie would continue with these hands, by activating the option 'show full table'. The default table is the one for the proposed bet size, the bet sizes PokerSnowie considers as best. You can click on the buttons '1/2 POT', 'POT' and '2 POT' to switch between the bet sizes and see the alternative tables. How does the hand range functionality work?

The hand range feature calculates a list of all hands that PokerSnowie would hold, given the circumstances of the game. At the top of the window the hand range is split by hand type. Clicking on the '+' sign opens the branch of the corresponding hand type and splits it further. At the bottom all individual hands are displayed. They are grouped by hole cards that are considered the same. For example, on preflop all 12 combinations of JTo are grouped together and all 4 combinations of JTs. The 'Combinations' column tells you the number of combinations remaining from that group. The combinations value may be further decreased by a certain percentage if PokerSnowie would have made the move the player made. If, for example, the player raised and PokerSnowie's advice is to raise 20% of the time, the combinations are multiplied by 0.2. The 'Probability' column assigns a probability for each hand normalized over the whole hand range, so the sum of that column adds up to 100%. The next column specifies the hand type, and the last column the draw type (if the situation is not on the river), for each hand.

'Straight (1)' is a gut shot straight draw and 'Straight (2)' an open-ended straight draw. You can sort each column by clicking on the column name. Please note that it can happen that no hands are found. That means that PokerSnowie would not have played the same way as the player did with any hand. How does the range advice functionality work? This feature is only available for the player to act. It works very similarly to the hand range feature but also constructs folding, checking/calling and betting/raising ranges. Selecting one of those ranges provides distribution information about the hand type and details for all hands that comprise the corresponding range. PokerSnowie has 3 different ranges for the bet sizes: 1/2 pot, pot and 2 pot. By default PokerSnowie selects the bet size it considers best, but it can be switched manually to see ranges for alternative bet sizes. It is also possible to see how PokerSnowie would play hands that are not in its hand range anymore. Clicking 'show all hole cards' provides the evaluations for all hole cards, independent on the hand range. PokerSnowie seems to show inconsistent hand ranges – why is that?

In some situations there may be an inconsistency between PokerSnowie's advice and the opponent's hand range. For example, PokerSnowie advises to call a bet on the river, while the opponent's hand range doesn't offer the right odds to call. How can there be such an inconsistency? First of all it has to be noted, that the evaluation (the move advice) is NOT based on the hand range of the opponent. The evaluation is the output of a neural network and has evolved during training. The neural network has been trained over trillions of hands, against various counter-strategies. Therefore these evaluations are very robust and can be trusted most. The hand range, however, is a calculation based on the evaluations of the same neural network. All legal hole cards are considered and the evaluations are used to decide which hole cards PokerSnowie would possibly hold in a certain situation. As a consequence, the evaluation may be different than a conclusion based on the hand range of the opponent. This, unfortunately, cannot be avoided; the problem would only vanish if the neural net was a perfect calculation of the game (and not an estimation based on pattern recognition). The hand range can be very sensitive to small changes in a previous round.

Two very similar situations on the flop may lead to quite different hand ranges on the river, if a group of hands falls out of the range due to a small EV difference on the flop. Similarly, two slightly different neural nets that play almost identically may have significantly different hand ranges. Therefore: What does the hand evaluation panel indicate? The evaluation panel displays PokerSnowie's advice on the current situation. On the left hand side, the player's move is described and classed as 'correct' or 'wrong'. The 'error' is simply the EV difference (in big blinds) between the best move and the played move. A mouse-over hint transforms the EV difference into the money amount given up. On the right hand side, you can select the bet size. By default, PokerSnowie's proposed bet size, displayed in green, is already activated. For every bet size there are three possible actions: fold, check/call, bet/raise. Every action is assigned a percentage value, which is the percentage of the time the corresponding action should be played. In most cases one move should be played 100% of the time. Sometimes, however, a mixed action is proposed.

For example, 90% 0% 10% means that the hand should be folded 90% of the time, never called and 10% bluff-raised. Next to the percentages the EV (expected value) is displayed in big blinds. Again, a mouse-over hint shows the money amounts. What does the hand strength panel indicate? In the hand strength panel, the hand of the player is compared to the ranges of the opponents. The scale of 'showdown strength' and 'betting strength' goes from 0.0 to 2.0, independently of the number of players still in the pot. This normalization has been done for easy comparison of the numbers and for clear classification of bets or raises with WEAK hands (as a bluff), STRONG hands (for value) and MEDIUM strength hands. The 'showdown strength' provides an estimation of how well the specific hand would perform against the ranges of all opponents still in the pot, with no more betting allowed (as if everybody was all-in). In the specific case of only one opponent, dividing the showdown strength by 2 gives you the player's 'equity vs. range'.

For example, a value of 1.20 corresponds to 60% 'equity'; 60% chance of winning a showdown against the opponent's range. The 'betting strength' is very similar to 'showdown strength', but it considers only the non-folding ranges of the opponents. We have defined 3 brackets. A low value classifies the hand as WEAK (0 - 0.6 on the scale), a high number would be considered as a STRONG hand (> 1 on the scale). A value between 0.6 and 1 would indicate a hand of MEDIUM strength. Again, in the case of having only one opponent, a value of 1.20 corresponds to a 60% chance of winning against the opponent's non-folding range. The 'betting strength' is different for each bet size. In general, the higher the bet size, the lower the betting strength. How does the filter manager work? All imported hands are stored in a local database. In the filter manager, a subset of all hands can be selected. All statistics and analysis will be based on this subset. The date range, poker rooms and stakes can all be filtered.

Under 'My aliases' you should find your screen names. If this is not the case, you can select it manually from the list of screen names below. The button 'Apply filters' activates the new filter settings and returns to the Statistics / Overview page. The Filter Manager is divided into 3 parts (Basic, Advanced, Hole Cards): Basic: How does the import manager work? PokerSnowie analyses the hands that you played in the online Poker rooms. The import manager lets you choose hands to import and manage the imported sessions. To start, click on 'Import files'. You will then be asked to choose one or several hand history files for importing. Alternatively, you can use 'Import folder' to import all hand histories located in that folder. Please note that only original hand histories are supported. See a list of supported Poker rooms . Exported hand histories from third party tools are not supported. After some time, when the analysis process is completed, you can select all or some files and view the analysis by clicking on 'View analysis'. To manage the imported sessions, mark the desired hand histories and then either right-click on the list or use the buttons next to 'View analysis'. You can remove or rename imports and group or ungroup them.

A copy of your uploaded files is saved locally under: C:\Users\<UserName>\My Documents\PokerSnowie\imported\ (Windows 7/8) or C:\Documents and Settings\<UserName>\MyDocuments\PokerSnowie\imported (Windows XP). Please note that your previous imports that were done before the name change from "PokerCoach" to "PokerSnowie" are still located under: C:\Users\<UserName>\My Documents\PokerCoach\imported\ (Windows 7/8) or C:\Documents and Settings\<UserName>\MyDocuments\PokerCoach\imported (Windows XP). How does "Challenge PokerSnowie" work? Challenge PokerSnowie is a training feature which lets you play directly against the Artificial Intelligence engine. Challenge PokerSnowie game configurator: Clicking on "Challenges" in the main menu opens The challenge PokerSnowie window, which will allow you to specify some parameters for playing against PokerSnowie. The Snowie opponents menu lets you choose how many opponents you wish to play against. The default is 1 opponent for Head's Up and you can choose up to 9 opponents for a full ring game.

The game type lets you choose between a freezeout mode or standard cash game mode. In Freezeout mode, the game ends as soon as you or all PokerSnowie opponents are eliminated. The cash game option lets you sit down and reload your bankroll for as long as you wish. The session ends when you decide to end it. In cash game mode, you can choose to rebuy automatically with the Auto rebuy to max threshold. By default it is set at 70% of your starting stack, but you can modify this with the selector to go down to 50% or up to 100% of your stack. Note that the PokerSnowie players reload following the same logic. After selecting "Cash game", if you choose a buy-in equal to or lower than 50BB, you have the option to play at a CAP table by checking the box underneath the buy-in. The buy-in value will be used as the CAP value; the auto rebuy threshold will work as usual. Please note that if at the beginning of a hand, the amount of money you have at the table is greater than the CAP value, it will be reset to the CAP.

The stake level option lets you decide your stake level, from 0.5/1 to 100/200. Furthermore, there is no rake incorporated in the game. You can choose between various starting stacks from as low as 15 BB up to 200 BB. Right at the bottom of the Challenge PokerSnowie configurator, you can choose to remove the default "fast fold option". Fast fold means that once you fold, a new hand is dealt right away. Otherwise a new hand would only start after the conclusion of the folded hand. Removing this option allows you to let all hands play out till the end. Table Features: You can open a maximum of 2 tables at the same time. On the cash game tables, you will see your current win/loss status as well as the number of hands played at this table. By default, new hands start automatically. You have an option to change this and pause the game with the "auto start next hand" tick box. If you have removed the fast fold option, then you will be presented with the option to "make Snowie hole cards visible". This means all the PokerSnowie players will turn their cards at the end of each hand.

Real time evaluation: By marking the "Real time evaluation" checkbox, players are offered an "Evaluation" button at the challenge tables. By clicking on this button a freely movable window opens and shows Snowie's recommendation for the player's hand in real time. Post game analysis: Once you have finished your play session, all your hands are automatically imported in PokerSnowie, where they are available for full analysis. The import process can take a couple of minutes after the end of the session. To analyse your Challenge PokerSnowie session, go to the import manager. The files from your game are called either cash_xxxxxxx or freezeout_xxxxx. Select the file you wish to analyse and click on the view analysis button to go through your play. A copy of your uploaded files is saved locally under: C:\Users\<UserName>\My Documents\PokerSnowie\imported\ (Windows 7/8) or C:\Documents and Settings\<UserName>\MyDocuments\PokerSnowie\imported (Windows XP).

Please note that your previous challenge sessions that were played before the name change from "PokerCoach" to "PokerSnowie" are still located under: C:\Users\<UserName>\My Documents\PokerCoach\imported\ (Windows 7/8) or C:\Documents and Settings\<UserName>\MyDocuments\PokerCoach\imported (Windows XP). How does bet sizing work for PokerSnowie? In any situation, PokerSnowie has three discrete options for choosing its bet size: 0.5 pot, 1.0 pot and 2.0 pot. This bet size depends on the specific game actions, the amounts of chips at the table, the community cards, etc. It does NOT depend, however, on the given hole cards. That means PokerSnowie chooses the bet size for its whole range of hands that it can hold at this time. Why does the bet size not depend on the hole cards?

Imagine the following example: in a certain preflop situation you raise with AA and KK 0.5 pot (to not scare away your opponents), with your medium hands 1.0 pot (to extract good value) and with your weak hands 2.0 pot (to make the opponents fold most of the time). This strategy may work for a few hands, but once your opponents become aware of what you are doing, it is very easy for them to exploit you. A more efficient strategy is to use just one bet size for all hands and not give away any hints about your hand strength. Even though theoretically it can be occasionally correct to have multiple bet sizes in one situation (with different, separately balanced ranges), in practice this would be very hard to implement. Does the bet size change the raising range? Absolutely! PokerSnowie has different hand ranges for each bet size. PokerSnowie has learned in the following way: if my bet size is 0.5 pot, what is then my raising range? if my bet size is 1.0 pot, what is then my raising range? if my bet size is 2.0 pot, what is then my raising range?

Only after defining those 3 ranges can the next question be asked: Which bet size gives me the best EV over my whole range of hands? What is the main difference between the raising ranges? In general, the higher the bet size, the fewer the hands that can be used to value-raise. A hand that is a marginal value raise with the bet size of 0.5 pot, will be called only by better hands if it is raised with a bet size of 2.0 pot, and effectively becomes a bluff at a high bet size. The higher the bet size, the more bluff hands can be added to each value hand, because the pot odds for the opponents become less attractive with higher bet sizes. If your bet size is 0.5 pot in the BB on preflop, for example, you should choose hands for bluffing that have enough potential when you get called. The probability of getting called is quite high, so the potential of your hand is really important. If your bet size is higher, the priorities shift a little. If your bet size is 2.0 pot, most of the times the pot ends after your raise and the potential of the bluff hands is less important.

Instead, the hands with good potential can be used for calling. Overall, the raising ranges are constructed very differently, depending on the bet size. In general, the 2.0 pot range is much more polarized than the lower bet sizes. Does the bet size depend on the stake level? Yes! Whether you play $0.10/$0.20 or $10/$20 makes a huge difference with regards to the rake. The lower stakes you play, the more severe the impact of the rake. Obviously, the higher the rake impact, the more you want to end the game already on preflop (no flop no drop), so in general PokerSnowie's proposed bet sizes are higher for low stakes. It is unusual (as of today) that players use 2.0 pot as their bet size. Why would that high bet size be correct? PokerSnowie uses the 2.0 pot bet sizes mostly in the following situations: When 2.0 pot is all-in and 1.0 pot is not all-in, there is a clear advantage for 2.0 pot: it kills the options of the opponent, he cannot re-raise anymore and is limited to fold or call.

When 2.0 pot is almost all-in, then the case is similar to the one above. While not killing the re-raise option completely, this bet size at least cripples the power of a re-raise. Why is there no bet size 0.75 pot? The available bet sizes is a design issue. In retrospective it would have been good to have also a 0.75 pot bet size, as it is a common bet size among players. On the other hand, all our simulations and calculations show that this addition would not have a significant impact on the overall performance of PokerSnowie. However, it is planned in the future to add this bet size anyway. Unfortunately this involves quite a long training process, as not only do we need to train the bet sizes again, we also need to train the correct ranges for a 0.75pot Does PokerSnowie play well against unusual strategies? The training algorithm is designed in such a way that the resulting strategy is extremely well balanced and largely un-exploitable. That means that it performs well against all kinds of counter strategies. That also includes counter strategies which use overbets, mini-bets and bet sizes between the ones that PokerSnowie proposes.

I see "Suggested bet size 1 pot" while at the same time the suggested action is a fold or a call. What does that mean? As explained above, the bet size is chosen for the whole range of hands. This bet size is displayed for information only, even when the right action with a specific hand is not a raise. Tim Harford — Article — The poker machine Tim Harford The Undercover Economist The poker machine The World Series of Poker in Las Vegas in 2000 attracted a record 500 players. Over four days, contestants were gradually eliminated until just two men were left to face off in poker’s flagship game, Texas Hold ‘Em. The more experienced player was a living legend named T.J. Cloutier, a 62-year-old Texan road gambler who was regarded by many as the best in the world. His opponent was a 37-year-old computer scientist from California named Chris Ferguson who had only been playing World Series games since 1996, never finishing higher than fourth place. Ferguson might have been a relative newcomer, but he was hard to miss.

He had earned the nickname “Jesus” because he hid his face behind a long beard and hair that cascaded over his shoulders, buttressed by wraparound mirror shades and a big cowboy hat. Ferguson never spoke during a game, determined not to show any sign of human emotion; he didn’t pay much attention to other players’ nervous tics either, preferring to draw all his information from the cards. In Las Vegas that week he had destroyed the field and came to the table with 10 times as many chips as his opponent. More…Cloutier, a former football pro with huge shoulders, paws that dwarfed his cards, and a dominant presence at the table, had seen it all before. Playing brilliantly and riding his luck, he ate into Ferguson’s lead and was only slightly behind when he lured Ferguson into serious trouble. By making a modest raise of $175,000, he provoked Ferguson into raising again to $600,000. Then Cloutier pushed about $2m dollars in chips into the pot, going “all in”. Ferguson paused, calculating the odds. Cloutier probably had a stronger hand than he’d expected.

However, Cloutier was playing well, and if Ferguson backed out of the pot now his opponent would have a substantial lead. On the other hand, if Ferguson called and won, the World Series was his. He reckoned his chances at about one in three, and that that was as good as it was likely to get. In a game of poker, players bet to earn the right to compare cards at the end of each hand, the “showdown”. A player who does not bet must drop out of the hand. The accumulated bets make up the prize for each showdown, the “pot”. The best combination of five cards wins the pot. Strong hands, such as a straight (five cards in sequence) or a full house (a pair and a triplet) are enviable, but also the gift of pure chance. The skill comes in betting and reading other players’ bets. Big bets may scare away an opponent who does not realise he holds the best hand, or they may simply ensure that when your full house wins, the pot is a big one. In Texas Hold ‘Em, each player holds just two cards. The other three are selected from shared cards, dealt on the table in stages to allow extra rounds of betting.

Before the shared cards are dealt, players can only guess how happily their two private cards will fit with the cards on the table. Nevertheless, it is common to see huge bets at that stage – none larger than those of Cloutier and Ferguson. Finally, after several minutes of furious thought, Ferguson removed his hat and shades, suddenly shrinking and revealing his human qualities of exhaustion and vulnerability – “much more like Jesus”, observed writer James McManus in Positively Fifth Street, his book on playing in the same tournament. (McManus himself was knocked out of the tournament in fifth place.) Then Ferguson called. Cloutier revealed he had an ace and a queen to Ferguson’s ace and nine. Since there were no more chips to bet, the five communal cards were revealed at an agonising pace. Ferguson had slightly overestimated his chances: they were one in four. He needed a nine to appear on the table to pair the one in his hand, and for no queen to show up and pair Cloutier’s. When the last card – a nine – hit the table, Ferguson realised what had happened before the hushed crowd did. His arms shot into the air and he leapt up to give Cloutier a boney embrace.

The great man took the loss with equanimity: “That’s poker,” he said, according to McManus in Positively Fifth Street. Ferguson’s record since then has proved that the upset that year was no fluke. Only four men have more World Series finishes in profit – poker’s equivalent of making the cut in golf – than Ferguson, and Ferguson won more World Series events from 2000-2004 than any of his rivals had in a decade. So “Jesus” has a respectable claim to be the most successful tournament player of the 21st century, and his ascendancy is more than just a personal triumph: it marks a turning point in the long campaign to apply the rigours of mathematics to the psychological subtleties of poker. Ferguson, who is reported to have won more than $5m in tournament play, is the best of a new generation of players trying to conquer poker with the branch of mathematics known as game theory. It is a curious struggle, one that has pitted bespectacled geeks against hardened gamblers. But the strangest thing is that poker intellectuals exist at all.

Late in the 1920s, the most brilliant man in the world decided to work out the correct way to play poker. John von Neumann, the mathematician who would mastermind the development of the computer and the atomic bomb, had been struck by an engaging new conceit: he wanted to apply mathematical principles to social sciences and devise a theory to analyse everything from the breakdown of diplomatic negotiations to unexpected co-operation between enemies, or even the possibility of nuclear terrorism. He believed that if you wanted a theory that could explain life, you should start with a theory that could explain poker – game theory. “Real life consists of bluffing, of little tactics of deception, of asking yourself what is the other man going to think I mean to do, and that is what games are about in my theory.” Bluff, deception and mind-reading are unpromising subjects for a mathematician to study, but if anyone could do it, it was von Neumann. His biographer, William Poundstone, says his ostentatious feats of calculation were notorious.

At Princeton after the war – where he arguably outshone his campus colleague, Albert Einstein – von Neumann helped to design the fastest computer in the world, then demonstrated that he was faster. Nobody was surprised. His colleagues joked that he was a demigod who, having studied humans intensively, was able to imitate them perfectly. To tackle poker, von Neumann had to break new ground. There had long been analyses of games of chance using probability theory. Then there are games such as chess, which are strictly logical – albeit demanding extraordinary feats of calculation. Poker is another matter altogether. Most of the important information in poker is private; each player sees only one part of the jigsaw and must piece together the bigger picture by observing what other players do. Since the strongest hand takes all the money, the higher the betting, the more expensive it becomes to lose. Yet in many hands of poker, especially between skilled players, there is no showdown: one player bets aggressively enough to scare the others away. In short, there is no straightforward connection between what a player bets and the hand he holds. It was the bluff that interested von Neumann. Novices wrongly believe that bluffing is merely a way to win pots with bad cards.

In the 1972 final of the World Series, the famous hustler Amarillo Slim won because he had bluffed so often that when he finally put all his chips in the pot with a full house (a very strong hand), his opponent assumed Slim was bluffing again; called (matching the bet), and lost. A player who never bluffs will never win a big pot, because on the rare occasions that he raises the betting, everyone else will fold before committing much money. Then there’s the reverse bluff: acting weak when you are strong. In the 1988 World Series, the Chinese-born Johnny Chan (dubbed the “Orient Express” because he won money so quickly) passed up every opportunity to raise the stakes and meekly called his opponent’s bets. By the last round of betting, his opponent became convinced that Chan didn’t have a hand and bet everything he had. Chan called and turned over a straight – a strong hand – scooping up $700,000 and the title of world champion. These stories seem to be all about psychology, not mathematics.

But although Chan and Slim had no interest in mathematics beyond calculating the odds, von Neumann’s theory could explain everything they had done. What von Neumann showed in his ground-breaking 1944 book, A Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (written with economist Oskar Morgenstern), was that you should bluff only with your worst hands, rather than with something half-decent. The reasoning is simple enough. A modest hand may beat another modest hand, so it’s worth limping along to a low-stakes showdown. A bad hand will only win anything if the opponent folds, so bad hands should be played aggressively or not at all; indeed, when the best players are caught running a huge bluff they are often holding the most atrocious cards. Von Neumann’s model also highlights the other benefit of bluffing: it forces the opponent to match your bids frequently, and so wins more money with strong hands. Von Neumann’s book was hugely celebrated, but academics were soon disillusioned: they found that game theory was too narrow and too difficult to apply to the real world.

The book sold poorly, although a few copies, as the Princeton University Press noted sheepishly in 1949, “were bought by professional gamblers”. It is a safe bet that young Walter Clyde Pearson was not a customer. “Puggy” Pearson was typical of the hard-living, cigar-chomping, poker professional of his time. He was born in Kentucky in 1929, to a dirt-poor family. But, as Michael Kaplan and Brad Reagan reveal in their book Aces and Kings, when Pearson joined the Navy in 1946 he began to clean up at poker and pool – during an 18-month tour of duty in Puerto Rico he wired home $10,000 to his mother. Pearson, who became world champion in 1973, had no use for mathematics. He was an intuitive poker player, and a highly aggressive one, whose big bets often scared other players into folding superior hands. It wasn’t the only sense in which he was aggressive; Pearson fled to Las Vegas in 1962 after cracking the skull of a Nashville bookmaker with a golf club.

And he moved to the desert city for good in 1963 after robbers ransacked his Nashville home. Pearson was a rough character, but at the time poker was a rough business. Amarillo Slim was once robbed of $50,000 by three armed men who broke into the house where he was playing and seized the stakes on the table. In 1976, Slim tried to buy into a Las Vegas casino in partnership with another poker devotee, casino owner (and convicted murderer) Benny Binion, who hosted the first World Series tournament in 1970 at Binion’s Horseshoe casino. But Slim was convincingly put off after a visit from friends of Tony Spilotro, the most feared man in Vegas, who was reputed to have hung a 320lb man on a meat hook and tortured him. The game didn’t begin to become safe for mathematicians until the late 1980s, when big entertainment corporations moved into Las Vegas and started to offer civilised ways to part people from their money. The geeks were welcome, but they were still struggling to turn game theory into wins at the poker table.

For many years after von Neumann’s death in 1957, academics were also struggling to apply game theory to real life problems of economics, biology and military strategy. One of the main difficulties was the sheer fallibility of human intellect. The joke about von Neumann being a demigod was spot on: he modelled his “zero sum” games as one demigod playing another, assuming that both players were as clever as he was himself. But excellent play cannot always assume an excellent opponent: there is no point in defending against brilliant strategies that your adversary is not smart enough to use. This problem can be particularly acute in poker. A game-theoretically perfect poker strategy will pass up big opportunities against weak opponents who may bluff too much or too little. Punishing one mistake requires conservative play; punishing the other requires more aggression. Game theory assumes the mistakes will not be made. Another difficulty for applying game theory that poker is so complex that even the fastest computer cannot find the optimal solution. Considering 10 possibilities a second, a player would have had to start calculating at the birth of the galaxy to find a game-theoretic solution for two players of Texas Hold ‘Em.

A real poker player who wanted to use von Neumann’s theories would somehow need to be able to perform calculations that were beyond even the great man himself. Or he would have to discover short cuts that simplified the mathematics without seriously damaging the quality of his play. And he would also need to recognise when the opponent was playing so badly that the game theory strategy needed to be set aside. It was going to take something special. In 1988, the fledgling internet began to reverberate with a new phenomenon: IRC Poker. This was a simple program that used something called “internet relay chat”, a precursor of today’s online chat rooms, to deal cards and moderate a game of poker between internet players. There was no money at stake, just the chance to beat the world’s most obsessive, highly mathematical geeks. Chris Ferguson soon emerged as a dominant player in this rarefied world. A computer-science graduate in the doctoral programme at University of California, Los Angeles, Ferguson was studying artificial intelligence, using game theory to help computers play board games. Ferguson was exposed to both poker and game theory at an early age. His family were avid games players, and his father was a maths professor who taught game theory at UCLA.

On some weekends, the younger Ferguson drove to Las Vegas and covered his hotel bill by playing very conservative poker against the tourists. But IRC Poker was a much better laboratory for someone who wanted to get inside the game and see what made it tick. It produced raw data for him to analyse and enough fierce competition to keep him hooked. He began using game theory to explore which hands to bluff with and how often to bluff, and the trade-offs between raising too little with a promising hand, versus raising too much and scaring people away. He memorised table after table of his results. His approach was pure von Neumann but, armed with powerful computers, he was able to analyse far more realistic poker games than his predecessor. Soon he began to produce some unexpected conclusions. He showed that the old-school poker professionals were raising too much with strong hands. The idea was to win the pot while they were still ahead, but Ferguson showed that it was worth making smaller raises and encouraging opponents to stay in to try to improve their cards. Sometimes those opponents would get lucky, but on balance the strong hand would make more money with smaller raises. “I showed a lot of my research to well-respected poker players,” Ferguson told me.

“They pooh-poohed it, I think because they didn’t understand it and disagreed with the results. But I knew that what I was doing was accurate, and that disagreement showed that mathematics could outplay the best players in the world.” That self-confidence is typical of Ferguson: he knew that game theory would give him an advantage, not because of his winnings at the table, but because the theory was right. By the time he outdrew T.J. Cloutier in 2000, few doubted that Ferguson had a formidable insight into the game. By 2005, the World Series had outgrown the ageing Binion’s Horseshoe casino and moved to the Rio Hotel just off the Las Vegas Strip. At hundreds of tables, 6,000 contestants toyed with their clay chips, filling the huge hall with a sound like a swarm of demented crickets. Many had qualified in online tournaments rather than paying the $10,000 entry fee – at peak times, more than 100,000 players around the world are playing internet poker for cash, a far cry from the old IRC days. Live televised poker has fed the demand, and been fed by it.

After the networks started installing cameras to film each player’s hidden cards, the world’s worst spectator sport became a gripping contest, and players such as Ferguson became huge stars. When I walked the casino floor with him at the Rio he was approached every few seconds for pictures or autographs. He responded each time with practised good grace. “I enjoy it,” he confessed. The new poker, open to anyone, has meant that cerebral players have had the courage to follow in Ferguson’s footsteps. “If poker were played only by outlaws in saloons, you wouldn’t get these doctors and lawyers here,” says Matt Matros, a mathematician from Yale and a poker writer who has won more than $750,000 playing in tournaments. Matros is certain that game theory is going to become a necessity to compete at the highest level of poker. So is Andy Bloch, an MIT graduate, game theorist and another tournament-winning poker player. Bloch believes that the two-person version of Texas Hold ‘Em will soon be solved, meaning that each decision at the table will have an answer that is known to be correct. Game theory certainly confers the biggest advantage in the two-player game against the best players.

Ferguson has reached both finals of a new head-to-head knockout all-star poker tournament, beating Cloutier on the way. If Bloch and Matros are right, every serious player will simply have to learn the moves for two-player poker, just as chess players memorise dozens of opening variations. But most poker is not head-to-head, and most players are nowhere near von Neumann’s optimal play. Most of the new poker players are not expert mathematicians, but hopefuls with more money than sense. “If you want to play poker to make money, you’re doing it for the wrong reasons,” says Ferguson. “You have to love the game, and you have to like to work hard.” Ferguson knows that amateur players spoil game theory’s assumption of expert play. Other top professionals believe that this will always limit the theory’s usefulness. Howard Lederer, broad-shouldered and standing well over six feet, is nicknamed “The Professor” for his studied game and demeanour. When I buttonholed him at the Rio, he told me there were too many bad players around for game theory to be the main asset of a professional. “Pure game theory only comes into play against another great pro in a very pure situation.

Basically, it’s the psychology of the game. You need to have a feel for the game theory, but psychology trumps game theory: dominating people at their moments of weakness in the tournament, getting to them.” If Lederer is correct, the flood of new players is undermining the usefulness of game theory. Game theory tells you how to avoid losing to perfect play, not how to beat the weak players – known as the fish. The more fish enter the game, the less relevant game theory becomes. The poker legacy of von Neumann may therefore rest with an unusual new breed of players. Back at Binion’s, just a short cab ride from the Rio, an alternative championship was being staged during the 2005 World Series. The scene was more internet cafe than casino, with the green baize hidden under a tangle of cables, six computers facing each other, invisibly playing dozens of hands a minute, dealing chips and betting with cards that existed only in cyberspace. When Binion’s hosted the World Series of Poker in 1970, participation was by invitation only; a few hands were played and then everyone voted to honour the veteran Johnny Moss with the title of world champion.

The 2005 World Poker Robot championship, the first such event, harked back to that tradition. The six software programs were there by invitation, and the true champion was not in doubt: the University of Alberta games research group, having defeated all electronic challengers for seven years, was asked to referee rather than play. Darse Billings, the strongest poker player in the Alberta team and another game theorist, sat down with me at a nearby table, delighted to be speaking to someone who had heard of John von Neumann. With a smiling moon face covered by a short fuzzy beard, Billings has something of the teddy bear about him, but he claimed to be less than cuddly when the chips are down. “I used to be the top of the IRC Poker tables,” he said, with obvious pride. What happened? “Chris Ferguson started playing and he overtook me.” Billings and his colleagues have yet to produce software capable of beating Ferguson, who is seen as a particular challenge because he is unfazed by an opponent who gives away no physical clues. But they relish the challenge of besting a world champion who holds a doctorate in artificial intelligence and game theory.

For now, though, just about any top human player can outplay the robots. In a pair of exhibition matches concluding the World Poker Robot championships, the big-name professional Phil “Unabomber” Laak was recruited to play the machines. As a partisan crowd chanted “Hu-mans! Hu-mans!” he swiftly disposed of both the Alberta program and the newly minted world champion, a program called PokerPro. Nobody was surprised. Artificial intelligence researchers see the same challenge in poker that von Neumann did nearly 80 years before them, that of understanding deception. At the moment von Neumann’s game theory remains the most successful approach, exemplified by the fearsome computer program, SparBot, which beats most of the humans who log on to the Alberta website to try their skill. “I believe that bots will eventually play better than all human beings,” predicts Billings. Ferguson agrees. “If poker robots had a tenth of the resources that were spent on chess, they’d already have beaten us.” Many commentators now fear that the robots will destroy the online game that so enthused their creators in the days of IRC poker.

Online poker players are thought to wager more than $250m a day – a tempting incentive to write a software program that could be let loose on unsuspecting “fish” all over the world. A decent poker player can make thousands of dollars a month playing the online game, so what if that player was replaced by an unlimited number of copies of a fiendish computer program? Billings is convinced that the risk of this happening soon has been exaggerated. His own SparBot, an academic project, does not play for money, while he dismisses the other programs as simply not good enough. “The fear of bots is a much bigger problem than the threat of bots. There are dozens of poker robots out there on the internet, but all they are doing is contributing money to everyone else.” But he admits that it is only a matter of time before anyone will be able to download a free poker robot that will outplay the world champion. At that point, people may not care to risk money online against unidentified opponents. One ironic possibility looms large: eventually, online poker will be dominated by the only poker players able to master John von Neumann’s game theory, the computers.

Meanwhile, the humans will retreat back to the flesh-and-blood world of the casinos, where a nervous tic can tell more than a thousand calculations. Human computers such as Ferguson have carved out a niche, but as long as there are fish to hook at the table, the time-honoured skills of Puggy Pearson and Amarillo Slim will not be lost. Rather than conquering traditional poker, the biggest legacy of the poker mathematicians may be to make the game more exciting for the rest of us than ever before. Published in FT Magazine, 6 May 2006.

Question: In poker, what is the name of a behavioral tick that gives away a players hand?
Answer: A tell