How to Keep a Poker Face
Keeping a poker face is a subskill of controlling your emotions. Once you get your emotions under control, your tells will get rid of themselves. If you're not feeling anything, you'll have no feelings to accidentally display.
Here are a few tips about keeping your composure and your poker face:
- Don't try to fake out your opponents by acting.
- Get rid of your poker tells.
- Practice makes perfect.
- Learn to manage your emotions.
Develop a Good Poker Face
A good poker face is emotionless. Some new poker players try to fake out their opponents by acting, but that's the easiest poker tell for an opponent to pick up on. The most elementary advice about reading other poker players is that someone who acts strong has a weak hand, and someone who acts weak has a strong hand.
So don't try to look sad or frustrated when you have good cards. You're not fooling anybody. Keep the same straight, emotionless face whether your hand is good or bad.
A blank face is hard to read.
How to Get Rid of Your Poker Tells
The expression on your face isn't the only poker tell you have. Fidgeting of any kind is a typical tell, and a lot of times, poker novices don't realize that they do this. And even if they do fidget, they think their fidgeting is the same regardless of what hand they have.
But the problem is that tells are unconscious. You don't realize that you
tap your fingers when you have a good hand. You don't know that running your
fingers through your hair is a sign that you have a bad hand.
Learn how to sit still. Learning to meditate can help with this skill.
Practice
If you play a lot of poker online, then you might think that showing your emotions during play is no big deal. But it creates bad habits that transfer to your live poker game. Use online poker as an opportunity to practice your poker face. During Internet poker games, focus on eliminating your poker tells, even though no one can see them.
Every time you sit down to play poker, even if it's penny ante poker with your kids, you have another opportunity to practice your poker face. Take advantage of these opportunities.
Never Show Any Emotion
One
way to get your emotions into check is to start taking the attitude that
events are neither good or bad, they just are. You'll win some
pots and you'll lose some pots. That's the nature of the game. Practice
equanimity.
Don't struggle. Just let the game happen, and make correct decisions, one after another. If you're struggling, your opponents will pick up on that and take advantage of it.
The Tao of Poker by Larry W. Phillips is a good book to read about this aspect of the game.
Poker isn’t just a game of math. It's also a game of managed emotions and mental trickery. Learning how to keep a poker face in a poker game can be one of the toughest skills to develop as a poker player, but it's also one of the most important.
Poker players who can't keep a poker face are at a big disadvantage over players who can.
This page about how to keep a poker in a poker game was last updated on
April 30, 2010.