Today’s Texas Hold’em Strategy is about poker tells, and how to exploit them. Millions of words have been written in the past about poker tells. We go through all sort of advanced poker strategies and Texas Hold’em contortions in order put a player on a hand during a cash game or poker tournament Scott Ian from the band Anthrax showed us how easy it can be identify a tell and change your poker strategy to take advantage of the new knowledge.
Phil Hellmuth wrote an article about a time that he had the opportunity to watch Scott Ian play Texas Hold’em at a big poker tournament. Scott was exhausted from shuttling between Anthrax commitments and poker events. In short, he was too tired to pull any poker strategy out of his nether regions that didn’t involve passing out. All he had left in the tank was the ability to listen, so Ian listened very intently to the conversation going on around him. He overheard the chip leader bemoaning his recent run of bad luck, and how he was going to “shut it down” until things started to turn about. In the world of poker tells, hearing someone talk about shutting down means that they can be pushed around.
Scott, who was playing a very tight, defensive form of Texas Hold’em acted on what he had heard. He had already developed a conservative table image, and he used this to take big chunks out of the chip leaders stack. Whenever he pushed, the chip leader gave in. This is a good situation for any poker player.
The bigger lesson here is that a good poker strategy is to keep your ears open and your mouth shut. You can’t listen and talk at the same time, and if you are attentive, your opponents may give away some very valuable information.
