People ask me questions about talking tells all the time. "While I was thinking about calling a big bet, my opponent kept saying, 'You should fold.' Should I have believed him or not?"

It's a difficult question to answer, because the meaning varies from player to player. Some players will say, "You should fold," when they want a call. Some will say it when they want a fold. And some will switch it up. I frequently just ignore statements like this one, because the information isn't reliable enough for me to act upon it.

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There are many different ways to play poker, and it is beneficial to all of us to find a style with which we are comfortable. Whatever your style might be, it will not serve you well to execute perfect poker strategy during a hand and then blow it by revealing your hand strength by giving off a tell. Not working on this could have disastrous effects on your poker game.

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Sometimes you get two challenges in the same hand: Does the aggressive play of an opponent indicate a hand that beats yours, and if so, does he indeed hold it or is he trying to buy the pot? Recently, I played a hand that had both of these aspects.

Background: Hands rarely stand by themselves in a vacuum, and this one is no exception. The player on my right, a pleasant fellow and occasional Las Vegas visitor from Australia, was an OK player with a tendency to raise quite a bit too loosely. I tend to punish guys like that with a blistering variety of three-bets, especially when I am in late position, and this evening was no exception. I must have already three-bet him preflop five times or more in about three hours, winning almost all of them (mostly when no one else called, and he folded on the flop).

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One of the reasons I prefer live play is that I can read and use tells. It is simply easier to play against people I can see. Once in a while, however, I get to make an inference from an unusual tell. I had such an experience in a Bellagio $30-$60 limit hold'em game.

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All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players: They have their entrances and their exits; And one man in his time plays many parts. -William Shakespeare

Tells in poker always fall into one of two categories- unintentional tells from players who don't realize what they're doing, and deliberate tells from actors. In this latter category, a player intentionally puts on a show to mislead his opponents. He's trying to fool you. This is the basis for that oft-repeated poker axiom, "Strong means weak and weak means strong." These would-be poker thespians want very badly to make you believe the opposite of the truth.

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At every WSOP Academy seminar, an attendee always comes up to me and asks "Joe, I've read your book, Mike Caro's book, and many others that focus on deciphering nonverbal tells, but I still have trouble reading my opponents. What if I've read all there is to read? What more can I do?" My answer is always the same: Try putting in a little more effort. Sometimes you need to step away from the books and venture into the real world.

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Some of you may be thinking that I’ve really lost it this time. It may seem incredulous that after explaining tells of expressive body parts like the feet, hands, eyes, mouth, and more, I’ve moved onto…the nose!

Yes the nose! The schnoz! The snout! Whatever you want to call it, it’s often overlooked. Most poker players focus on the eyes or the mouth but ignore what’s in between. The nose can tell us quite a bit and by the end of this article you might be wondering what else you’ve been overlooking at the table all this time..

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The face, legs, and mouth have been the focus of my columns recently because they often betray the most obvious nonverbals, but I’ve neglected a very important area of the body that can really cue you in on an opponent’s emotions. Tells of the fi ngers and thumbs can be a valuable part of your investigation at the table, so next time you’re trying to read an opponent’s hand, try paying some attention to their hands.

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There are two ways that nonverbal behaviors (tells) can impact your financial wellbeing at the tables. You can make money by using your opponents’ tells to play more effectively against them.

You can save money when opponents can’t use your own tells to play more effectively against you. Which brings me to Navarro’s Axiom: To save your money, learn to conceal and not revealtm. Even if you are a poor reader of other people’s tells, you can still preserve a lot of your chips if you learn to conceal the majority of your tells from other players at the table. The less you reveal, the less likely it is that others will be able to take advantage of you..

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In my previous column I introduced you to Navarro’s Axiom: To save money, learn to conceal and not reveal. I emphasized that even if you are a poor reader of other people’s tells, you can still preserve a significant portion of your bankroll if you learn to conceal the majority of your tells from other players at the table. The less you reveal, the less likely others will be able to take advantage of you. I then outlined a 13-step strategy for achieving this concealment objective. In this second of three columns on the topic, I want to explain how you can assess and monitor the effectiveness of your table image to make sure your concealing efforts are, in fact, working. Following my recommendations will involve some significant time and effort on your part but, if you are serious about winning money at the poker table, that will be a small price to pay for some big profits in the years to come.

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At the 2006 WSOP Main Event one thing was certain: There was no dress code! All forms of fashion were on display, including costumes that could have passed muster at a masquerade ball or Halloween party. One particularly memorable player sat down to play with a bright red Tickle Me Elmo mask encasing his entire head.

If he was wearing this outfit to conceal his facial tells it probably did the trick, although any advantage was most likely offset by heat exhaustion. Although the Elmo gambit did not vault this particular competitor to the final table, it does raise an interesting question: Should a player use props, like a mask, to help conceal not reveal tells while playing poker?.

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Ten-time world poker champion Phil Hellmuth has an interesting approach to poker. “When I sit down at a poker table, I play a game within the game,” he explains. “I try to guess exactly what two cards my opponent has in the hole. I can usually narrow it down to a very few possibilities, and on occasion I have ventured a guess out loud when I felt confident about it. I’d freak the other players out when I would guess my opponent’s Q-Q. He would flip his Q-Q face up and say, ‘How in the world does he do that?’”.

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When playing poker live, ‘tells’ such as shaking hands, a dry gulp, the tone of a player’s voice, or even what they’re wearing, can all be used to decipher the strength of an opponent’s hand, or their overall skill level and experience. When it comes to online poker, though, the general perception is that due to the lack of physical tells, the only reads you can get are to do with betting patterns and the previous behaviour of your opponents, and that those tells are somewhat unreliable at best.

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Some say you can't pick up tells online. I do it all the time, and I'm not talking about patterns or situations. I mean honest-to-goodness tells with which other players let me know their holdings.

A pattern is the tendency of a player to do something regularly. For example, a player needs at least such and such a hand to open from under the gun. The player might be aware of position, and the hand he plays depends on what his position is. Another player might come in from any position with whatever hand she deems playable. Some players always limp. Some players always come in for a raise. Some mix it up. All of these actions fall into the category of patterns.

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