Study online poker strategy for enough time and you’re bound to come across the old logic that there is a universal way to determine online poker tells. Perhaps you’ve already seen how nearly every website seems to have an online tells article explaining how you can figure out exactly what someone is doing based on the amount of time they take to make a decision.
This little line of logic basically states that people with good hands will take a while to make their decision because they want to appear to have a weak hand. The other side of the coin is that people who are bluffing will make decisions as quickly as possible in order to act as if they have an awesome hand. Looking at both pieces of advice, one can supposedly figure out their opponent just by paying attention to how much time is taken on each play.
Unfortunately, this is one of the most misguided pieces of advice out there since you can’t just look at the amount of time people are taking in between plays to figure out what’s going on. A lot of poker players are playing multiple tables at once so the whole time constraint logic is absolutely irrelevant at this point. Plus most players already know about this bit of poker strategy so they are fully aware that people could be trying to read them based on the amount of time they take to make a play.
The truth is that the only way to spot an online tell is by looking at each individual player and what they do. This is a lot more difficult than just blindly following the aforementioned universal strategy, but it’s a lot more accurate than anything else.