My own personal "tells" coach

Another story from the Excalibur last night. There's a guy two seats to my left. I played a hand perfectly (if I do say so myself), deceiving him into thinking that I was on a steal when I had actually flopped a set of 7s and made a full house on the river when the board paired. He called my all-in with A-8, for top pair and a bad kicker. I stacked him. Just before he did the "walk of shame" to the ATM for more cash (see http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2008/02/taking-walk-of-shame.html), he said, "You really need to work on controlling your hands shaking when you bet. I didn't know if it meant you had a monster or were bluffing, so I had to call to find out. Now I know."

This was clearly meant in a friendly, helpful manner, so I didn't tell him how completely full of crap he was.

First, anybody who knows anything about poker tells realizes that shaking hands is not ambiguous; it's one of the most reliable signs of a player being strong. You might think that you'd get the same phenomenon from nervousness when somebody is making a big, expensive bluff, but it just doesn't happen that way. In Mike Caro's classic Caro's Book of Poker Tells, he rates this as 99% reliable in weak players, 95% reliable in average players, and 92% reliable in strong players, which is as high as he rates anything. He even gives "Caro's Law of Tells #4," which is "A trembling bet is a force to be feared." In the more recent Ultimate Guide to Poker Tells by Randy Burgess and Carl Baldassarre, pp. 58-59, they agree: "[I]t's a huge tell in all forms of poker.... Players who've never seen this tell may have a hard time believing it, but yes, it's that powerful an indicator. Moreover, it can't be faked with any degree of realism." Joe Navarro, in Read 'Em and Reap, says, "When you see someone reaching for his chips and his shaking hand knocks them over, or he looks at his cards and his hands begin to tremble, it's usually a strong sign that something good has occurred." Navarro adds a caveat that it occasionally means the opposite, but I believe he's wrong about that, or at least it's a rare enough phenomenon that I've never seen it. My experience exactly matches Caro's: when it is present, it's perhaps the single most consistently reliable guide you'll get that a player loves his hand. I have saved a lot of money by folding when I have noticed this in an opponent, who then proudly shows off his quads or full house.

Second, I know with certainty that there is and was no difference in my hands during that pot from any other. You see, this is something I've spent an enormous amount of time and energy on. I have a familial condition that causes a constant hand tremor. It's not horrible, but it's there; you wouldn't notice it under ordinary conditions, but if I held my hands out, trying to hold them still, you'd see what I mean. It hardly ever matters to my life. But part of the condition is that it is greatly amplified by even small amounts of adrenaline. This has been a problem in the past with public speaking (which I actually enjoy, but the adrenaline rush makes my hands shake like crazy, and it looks like I'm terrified), playing the piano in public (which I used to do for church quite often), and my other main recreation, which is competitive handgun shooting (need I explain how shaking hands is a problem there?). Long ago, I started taking a medication called propranolol when I anticipate one of these situations. It blocks the effects of adrenaline on the nerves, so that I'm just left with my baseline, everyday tremor. I use the same little pill before I go out to play poker. (I was fortunate enough to have a doctor who immediately "got" the problem. I started to explain it, but he cut me off and said, "Other players see your hands shake, and you can't get any action when you've got the nuts." Bingo! Got my prescription. Today's lesson: Find yourself a doctor who plays poker!) I have watched myself carefully to be sure, and I know that my hands look exactly the same whether my card situation is strong or weak. This guy was just seeing my baseline tremor, and interpreting it the way he wanted to. It doesn't look anything like the high-amplitude shakes that accompany the adrenaline rush of a huge made hand.

Third, this isn't something that one can voluntarily control. Adrenaline is going to do what it's going to do. People overcome it not by force of will, but by being exposed to the situation of having a monster hand enough times that eventually they stop having such large adrenaline dumps when it happens.

So, OK, the guy needed to soothe his big loss by telling himself that he had spotted something significant and just couldn't pin down its meaning. No big deal. If listening to an unwelcome (and wrong) piece of advice is the price for taking a guy's entire stack, I can tolerate that.

When he returned, he decided to take the open seat on my immediate left, from where he decided that we were best friends and should chat about everything. I hate that. I eventually had to put on the music and headphones to help clue him in that I didn't feel like his oldest buddy. He kept trying to show me his cards while he played hands, etc. So annoying.

But the strangest part of the evening was that three more times he watched me play a big pot. I had the best of it in all three, and won two of them (losing the biggest one to a river suckout, unfortunately--ouch!). After each one, he said something like, "You controlled your hands much better that time," or "You did that one very smooth--good job." He had appointed himself as my own personal "tells" coach, giving me feedback on whether I was effectively controlling my hand shake. My hands were exactly the same every time--the only difference was his interpretation of it.

Before our first confrontation, I had overheard him chatting with another player, making himself out to be a big-time gambler, belittling other people who "don't really understand gambling" like he does. That sort of talk made it obvious that his ego is heavily invested in being a suave, smooth, sophisticated player of all of the games. His conduct towards me was a reflection and continuation of that; it was important to his self-image to be the expert, offering advice to a person he perceived as an inexperienced amateur. It was simultaneously annoying, funny, and pathetic.

One of the most cathartic things about having this blog is that I get to say things to people that I would never say to their faces, partly because of being removed from them when I write, and partly because there's only about a one in a million chance that the people involved will ever read it. So here goes again: Buddy, you haven't a clue what you're talking about. Your advice was flatly wrong, ludicrously misdirected, irritating, unwelcome, condescending, and indicative of a deep personality disorder in yourself that I think you haven't the faintest clue about.