Only when you are a decent winner at $1-2 would I recommend spending a good amount of time thinking about tells/behavior. I mention this mainly because I think there are many $1-2 players who think they are better than they are, and who need a lot of work put in on basic strategy. So if you’re a struggling live $1-2 player, long before doing something like reading one of my books on poker tells, or getting my video series, I’d instead recommend reading a basic strat book like Dan Harrington on Cash Games, James Sweeney’s Dynamic Full Ring Poker, or Ed Miller’s Small Stakes No Limit Hold’em. Not that poker tells aren’t present they are, but most players’ time would be much better spent studying some basic strategies and not looking for tells. Playing in these games reminded me that, for your average live $1-2 player, thinking about poker tells is far from the best use of their time.

It’d been a while since I played $1-2 (haven’t been playing much at all lately with the exception of some $2-5 and the occasional $100+ tournament), so I was kind of curious what I’d find.īefore getting to the tells, a few caveats about using tells in a live $1-2 NLHE game: In the past couple of weeks (November 2012), I played a few sessions of live $1-2 NLHE with the purpose of studying what poker tell information was the most important and relevant.

Update: Did you know I have a poker tells video series? Check it out here.

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