Six tells that survive the move from a live table to an online one

Most of what was written about tells assumes a body on the other side of the table. Online there is no body, and the honest conclusion is that most of the classic material does not transfer. What does transfer is anything that leaves a trace in the action itself — six patterns we would still act on, with the caveats each of them needs.

1. Bet sizing that varies with hand strength

The strongest readable pattern in online poker, and the easiest to collect. Some players bet two-thirds with a made hand and a third with a draw, or a round number with value and an odd number when bluffing. It requires no timing data and no software: it needs you to remember two or three showdowns and notice that the sizes matched the hands. Once seen, it decides later hands outright.

2. Timing, with a large asterisk

An instant check often means a hand with no plan — the check box was pressed before the decision needed making. An instant call can mean a drawing hand that never considered folding or raising. A long pause followed by a raise, from a player who normally acts quickly, usually means a decision was actually taken.

The asterisk is multi-tabling. A player on six tables pauses because another table demanded attention, not because your bet was difficult. Time bank use, connection latency and the software’s own animation all add noise in the same direction. Treat timing as evidence only from a player whose baseline speed you have seen across a stretch of hands, and discount it entirely against anyone whose pattern is uniformly slow. Our older piece on online poker tells made the same argument when multi-tabling was new, and the problem has only grown since — multi-table play is now the norm rather than the exception.

3. Street-by-street continuation frequency

Not a tell in the live sense, but the most reliable read available: what share of flops does this player bet after raising, and what share of those does he follow up on the turn? A player who bets every flop and almost no turns is telling you where to put your money, and he will keep telling you for as long as you keep watching. This survives the move online better than anything else, because online is where the sample accumulates fast enough to trust.

4. What happens after a lost pot

The three hands after a cooler are where leaks appear in public: a raise from a player who had folded forty hands in a row, a limp-reraise out of nowhere, a stack suddenly played at twice the previous speed. It is the one live tell that transfers intact, because it lives in the betting rather than in the face. The same pattern read from the inside is the subject of our routine for the three hands after a bad beat.

5. Buy-in and rebuy behaviour

Whether a player tops up to the maximum automatically, sits with an odd short stack, or reloads immediately after losing one says something about how he thinks about money at the table. Auto-top-up to the cap is usually a regular; a stack that drifts down over an hour without a reload is usually not; an instant reload of the exact amount just lost is frequently the fourth item on this list in progress.

6. Chat, and the silence around it

Chat is mostly noise, with two exceptions worth watching. A player who comments on other people’s play is paying attention to results rather than decisions. And a player who goes quiet immediately after being loud has usually just lost a pot he has not finished thinking about. Our page on using the chat feature covers the etiquette; what we are describing here is only the information it leaks.

What died in the move, and the sample-size rule

Everything physical: hand tremors, breathing, eye movement, the way chips are stacked, the glance at a stack before a raise. There is no online substitute, and claiming to read a webcam feed with any reliability is not something we would put our name to. What replaces them is volume — you see three or four times as many hands per hour, so patterns that a live player would never accumulate become visible.

That is also the discipline. A single observation is noise: one instant call proves nothing, and acting on it is how a read becomes an excuse. The threshold we would use is a pattern seen across at least twenty hands, or two independent showdowns that point the same way. Below that, the correct read is the one from the first item on this list — what the sizes were when the cards were turned over. The reverse problem, a player feeding you patterns deliberately, is covered in tells and false tells in online hold’em, and the live-table originals are still set out in tells and how to spot them.