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EVOLUCIÓN DEL ISC ESPECÍFICO A LOS COMBUSTIBLES (Nuevos soles por galón)
same behavior can mean two completely different things when observed in different situations. The two main situational categories are waiting-to-act and post-bet. (I originated these categories in my book Reading Poker Tells.) Here are short definitions of these categories: Waiting-to-act behavior: behavior observed when a player is waiting for an opponent to act Post-bet behavior: behavior observed after an opponent has bet The feelings and motivations of players in these two situations can be very different. For example, a player who has made a bet is in a more potentially stressful situation than a player who is waiting to act. A player who has made a bet will often be either bluffing or value-betting (especially as the hand gets closer to the final round of betting) and these polarizations in hand strength will sometimes result in a polarization of behavior.
Also, a player who has made a bet is also more likely to be studied by an opponent, which can also be potentially stressful. Waiting-to-act players, on the other hand, don’t feel as much stress; they’re not making a potentially stressful bet and they’re usually not being studied by an opponent. They have less at stake at that specific moment and are generally more relaxed.
Here’s an example of why considering these situations can be so important.
Your opponent, when waiting to act with a weak hand, may have a tendency of staring at you in a defensive attempt to prevent you from betting. The same player may, after betting with a strong hand, have a tendency of staring at you due to being relaxed and wanting to goad you into calling. This player exhibits the same behavior – looking at you – but the behavior has two completely opposite meanings depending largely on the situation. Without factoring in the importance of the situation, you might think something like, “I saw him staring at me when I was betting earlier and he was weak and now he’s staring at me after he bet – so he must be weak.”
Not understanding this concept is a major reason why many players aren’t able to successfully find and use poker tells. Besides these two main situational categories, there are many other factors that can influence a situation and make it different from other ones. The more you play live, the more you’re able to recognize how one situation is different from, or similar to, another situation. This can lead to a better understanding of behavioral changes.
Hand strength definition and polarization
Another important situational factor is how well-defined a player’s hand strength is likely to be. The more defined a player’s hand strength is likely to be, the more likely it becomes that a bet-related behavior will be meaningful. (We are talking here mainly about tells of relaxation or anxiety from a bettor; there are other, more casual, behaviors that can also be meaningful.) The last round of betting shows the most extreme example of this concept. On the river, a bettor almost always knows whether he is value-betting or bluffing. When this player makes a significant bet, his hand strength is almost always polarized, so his behavior is more likely to be polarized and more likely to be meaningful. At the other extreme end of the spectrum, in the first round of betting (preflop in hold’em-type games), hand strength is unlikely to be well-defined. With almost all starting hands, players are genuinely ambivalent about whether opponents call or fold. (The main exception is that almost all players want to get action with A-A and K-K.) The high likelihood of a preflop bettor being ambivalent means that his behavior has the potential of being quite varied and therefore it won’t be nearly as easy to “pin down.” To put it simply: it’s hard to get reads from people who genuinely don’t care about the situation, and that’s often the case preflop.On the flop, hand strength is more defined than preflop but is still much less defined than on the river. It’s possible for a flop bettor to be betting a wide variety of hand strengths (e.g., strong draws, weak made hands) while being genuinely ambivalent about whether he gets action or not.
For these reasons, most meaningful bet-related behavior will be found on the turn or river. (Again, I’m speaking mainly about tells related to anxiety or relaxation; there are often meaningful “casual” tells displayed earlier in a hand.) As a hand progresses, bets are increasingly likely to indicate more defined hand strength.
A few other general factors that influence the likelihood of a player’s hand strength being polarized (either a strong hand or a bluff) are: Large bets: the larger a bet, the more likely it is to represent a polarized range. Raises: with each raise, a player’s range becomes more likely to be polarized. Board texture: on highly coordinated boards, bets will be more likely to indicate a polarized range. (For example, a significant bet on a turn board of 8 -7 -6 -9 is likely to be the higher end of the straight or a bluff.) These points again emphasize the importance of considering the many possible situational factors when studying behavior. (Obviously this can be a very complex area.)
The importance of opponent skill level
When trying to interpret an opponent’s behavior, it’s important to have a sense of how skilled your opponent may be. It’s obviously easier to find reliable poker tells from amateur players than it is to find tells from experienced players. Recreational players will be more likely to adhere to common general patterns. You’d be much more likely to trust a read you have on a recreational player than you would be to trust a read on an experienced player.
Experienced players are capable of reversing the common meanings of general patterns (i.e., displaying false tells) and more likely to know how to cater their behavior to certain opponents. Sometimes a behavior from a player you perceive as skilled will lead you to conclude that the behavior you’ve noticed is most probably a case of second-level deception (i.e., reverse psychology, or a false tell) and you will be able to make a decision based on that. A player might be a very skilled online player but be very new to playing live. If you know this, you might have more faith in your reads of that player, knowing that he has the potential of leaking information in fairly common or obvious ways.
The point is that you should always try to take your opponent’s experience and level of thinking into consideration when interpreting behavior.
Looking for behavioral variety
When trying to find poker tells, the first step is to look for an opponent who displays behavioral variety. This means that an opponent behaves one way in one situation and later, in a similar situation, behaves differently. For example, let’s say in one hand a player bets immediately on the river and in another hand he takes a long time to bet on the river.Without knowing anything yet about the meaning behind his actions, we know that this player’s behavior is inconsistent. He may still be balanced; the presence of behavioral variety doesn’t always indicate the presence of a poker tell. The point is that his behavioral diversity is a clue that makes it likely
that he’s imbalanced and that he has a pattern. If his behavior were mostly the same in every situation (as the behavior of many skilled professional players will be), there will be less “return on investment” in studying the player for possible behavioral patterns.