Poker Tell: The Verbal Check
If you pay attention to the way the players at your table say ‘check’ in a live game then you can sometimes tell if they don’t have a good hand and you’ll have a tell that most players don’t even look out for.
Listen to how your opponents say ‘check’. They will either say ‘check’ or ‘check?’. When they say ‘check’ as a question, then most of the time it means that they don’t have a very strong hand and without knowing what they are saying they are asking you if you have a strong hand.
You’ll need a good ear to hear the subtle differences between the different ways people say ‘check’, but once you identify a ‘check’ presented as a question then you have a powerful tell that will win you a more pots.
Now this tell is not 100% full-proof, but there are many weaker players that give off this tell. To exploit this tell it would really only work when you are heads-up. There’s no sense in bluffing into a pot if you know one player is weak and are unsure of the other player(s). So if you are heads-up and you hear someone say ‘check?’ then you should probably go a head and make a decent bet at the pot and most of the time you’ll take the pot down right there.
In a live game last night we played a single table NLH game and four of the eight players on the table had this tell (these players would verbally say check as opposed to gesture checking with their hand). One of the players was a check-raiser addict and when he didn’t say ‘check’ as a question then I knew he was ready to setup his check-raise.
So listen carefully on how the players say ‘check’ and not only will it possibly tell you if they are weak but it may also give you an indication that they may be holding a strong hand.
Shortly after learning this tell I caught myself doing this tell a lot and now I try to only use my hand to gesture a check whenever possible.
Want to learn more poker tells? Caro’s Book of Poker Tells is a great classic poker book that every poker player should own.
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