Poker is a card game where players bet on the value of their hands. The game has many variants, but the most common one involves betting between two players and multiple rounds of betting. In each round, the player may call (match) a previous player’s bet, raise it, or concede. Often, players will bluff and hope that opponents will call their bets.
While some players believe that bluffing is a good way to improve their win-rate, others are skeptical. In this article, Ryan Fee explains why it’s important to weigh the odds of your opponent’s bluffing before calling it.
Professional poker players are experts at extracting signal from noise across a range of channels and integrating them to both exploit their opponents and protect themselves. For example, they use software to build behavioral dossiers of their opponents and even buy records of their opponent’s “hand histories.”
They are also skilled at reading cues, such as body language, from other players. These can be as simple as a change in posture or as complex as a gesture. Using these tells, they can identify other players’ intentions and plan accordingly. In addition, poker players are expert at controlling their own emotional states. This allows them to focus on the emotions of their opponents, and use that information to make better decisions. A player who cannot control their own emotional state, or who lets it influence their decision making, is likely to lose money.