I know I said that I’d choose a name for this weekly column today... But I was bluffing. I never had any intent of doing it.

Could you tell I was lying?

Probably not. It’s hard to know when someone’s lying via text alone, and it’s even harder when you don’t get to see a face. But if you saw me in person, there’s a good chance that you might have intuited that I wasn’t telling the truth; when someone lies, they usually can’t look you in the eye. Their gaze drifts up and to the left.

Or so I have heard.

Which is why today’s article is not on Limited Magic. It’s about lying and misdirection, and whether we can apply the lessons from another card game to Magic. And it all came about because I read a classic book on the subject this weekend:

Caro’s Book of Poker Tells.

Now, the question of “tells” is a classic feature of poker mythology, from the classic Oreo tell in Rounders to Le Chiffre’s trap tell in Casino Royale. It’s the signal that your opponent is lying in some way to you. But in movies, the tells are blindingly blatant: I love Rounders, but the fact that Malkovich’s character had a big stack of Oreos in front of him that he ate with a flourish at certain times was only slightly less obvious than if he’d worn a large neon billboard behind him that periodically lit up with the words “I HAVE A GOOD HAND NOW.”

Caro, a renegade of Poker theory who’s lived long enough to see his strategies become established wisdom, dissects the tell. There are many of them, and he lists each of them along with a rough percentage of how often weak, intermediate, and strong players use them.

He starts off by establishing, via a very long anecdote involving two games with the exact same cards, something that almost every Magic player knows instinctively: Even when every player has the exact same hand, the game can go very differently depending on how each player feels.

In other words, there is no single clear “best strategy” in Poker. There are too many options and too many people, so you’re often placed in situations where folding or calling are both justifiable options because there’s no clear-cut right or wrong. And the way a game unspools for the other players if you fold is entirely different than if you call a bet, meaning that the strategy that influences an entire table often comes down to how the other players feel.

Which means that reading (and influencing) other players is critical for poker.

There are over a hundred tells in this book, each illustrated copiously with photos. But all of the tell betrayals boil down to two basic strategies:

1) The Act: Strong means Weak, and Weak means Strong.
The essence of the tell is that people invariably try to hide the hand they have, simply because it’s in their best interests to. If you have a full house in Poker, you want your opponent to bet as much as he can... So you try not to look him in the eye, lest you scare him off. You look down, meekly, trying to fade into the carpet.

Weak means strong.

On the other hand, if you’re bluffing, there’s no sense in doing nothing when your whole goal is to intimidate your opponents into folding before they see you have nothing. So you act, with varying levels of aggression, in a way that indicates you have nothing to lose.

Strong means weak.

The exact methods of hiding, of course, are what Caro is there to inform you of... And that, he does pretty well (though the photos he uses are often hard to see, small and fuzzy, and not particularly well-composed enough that you’re sure where you should be looking). Not everyone uses the same tells, but there are some common mannerisms that groups of people share: people who look directly at you usually have little, whereas folks who are looking away are usually strong.

(As a loose rule, the more a player’s interacting with you, the more likely it is that he’s bluffing... Which makes sense. Why would a guy go out of his way to draw attention to himself if he wasn’t trying to influence you?)

A lot of the tells are kind of splashy, and don’t really apply to Magic; a bluffer will sometimes go for the chips prematurely to try to dissuade people, and he’ll aggressively fling his bet into the center. Whereas a guy with a strong hand will sometimes actively pretend to discard their hand before your bet, shuffling his cards off to the side to feign getting a fresh three that he does not really need.

There is one other thing, of course, and that’s the reversal. People are going to try to fool you. And that’s when you have to take one other thing into account:

2) How Can You Tell When People Aren’t Acting?
There are two kinds of tells: conscious and unconscious. The first is what folks do when they’re trying to mislead you into acting differently. The second is what people do when they’re not really paying attention.

The acting bluffs generally tend to be splashy, as you’d expect, but the unconscious tells are a little subtler. The classic tell is that people guard the hands they consider valuable; they’ll usually keep them shielded underneath a palm or hold them in hand, as opposed to leaving them flung face-down on the table. And a guy covering his mouth is usually someone who is actively trying to hide, meaning that he’s got a strong hand and doesn’t want anyone to see him.

But some of the tells spring from the way the game is played. For example, if the dealer lays down a new card that everyone can see and your opponent has to look at his hand, you can generally assume that the guy didn’t have a solid hand going into the reveal. Why? Because if the card the dealer showed was obvious, like a Jack when he already had a pair of Jacks in his hand, he wouldn’t have to go look again — he’d know. Whereas the secondary peek means that the dude is assembling a good hand, probably a flush of some sort, and needs to verify whether the card helps or hurts him.

Then there are the secondary bouts of tells. A trembling hand as someone goes all-in usually means that it’s a good hand, because the release of tension is making him shake. This is it. Whereas someone leaning back with his arms folded is the sign of someone who’s playing conservatively, and will bet only when he has something worthwhile.

And lastly, there are the “loose” tells, which indicate whether a player is only going to bet when it’s worthwhile — which is usually signaled by a neatly-straightened stack of chips and a clean, well-pressed set of clothes — or whether he’s in it for fun and excitement, which is indicated by sloppy chips and a friendly, happy way of talking.

It’s not an exact science, of course, and it’s rarely as neat as “Phil itches the back of his head every time he gets a good hand.” But as Caro notes, Poker is a game of odds: even if you fail at reading them sometimes, even a handful of successful guesses can mean a huge difference at the end of the evening.

The Book Says...
Caro’s book is a classic in the field, and generally its acclaim is well-deserved. The photos, as I said, aren’t always clear, but he’s obviously put a lot of thought into how people act when they’re playing poker... And speaking as someone who made his mark in Magic by playing other people’s reactions at a multiplayer table, generally he’s correct. The details are often a little tedious, becoming endless variants on “Here’s how a bluffer handles their chips,” but it’s packed with a lot of real-life information.

It’s not the easiest read — well, it’s easy to read, being well-constructed, but there is a lot of information here to be digested. Were I serious about poker, I’d probably read this three or four more times just to ensure that I got what I needed to from it. But that raises the next question:

How Much Do Tells Matter In Magic?
Converting poker tells into Magic tells is a little harder, because Magic has fewer moving parts. Poker has chips, and a dealer that’s often slapping down cards for you in the center, and hands that often get actively discarded. About 40% of the book deals with the way that people handle their chips or watch the flop, meaning that it doesn’t work for Magic.

Then there’s the one-on-one nature of Magic, which makes it even harder; there’s nowhere to hide in duels, because the only opponent is the guy across from you. He can pretend not to be interested in your hand, but it’s not like it has the same effect that it does in poker, because you know that he is. And it’s not like if he pretends to be not a threat that you’re not going to pound him anyway.

That said, there are moments where the tell comes in handy. We’ve all had that moment in Magic where you’re debating whether you’ll lay one more creature to the table to keep the pressure one; if he has global removal, he could wipe the board and wreck you for overcommitting, but if he draws spot removal and wipes one of your creatures out he could turn the tempo.

It’d sure be nice to know.

But how much is it worth?

See, the problem I have with thinking about tells in terms of Magic is that Poker is a much simpler game than Magic, and it has different goals. First of all, Poker is a game of sheer odds, and the strategy comes mostly from knowing when to bet or when not to bet. In other words, the best strategy involved in Poker is knowing how to read your opponents.

But while Magic has moments where reading your opponent is critical, that’s not its main focus. You can know exactly how strong your opponent’s hand is, but if you don’t mulligan to six when you draw six lands and a single spell, you’re probably doomed no matter what. Likewise, we all know the power of the God Hand and how that just sometimes trumps any strategy you may have that day.

Magic puts your back up against the wall in ways that Poker doesn’t. It requires you to have a lot more involvement with the cards, and knowing when to play them, and knowing what to play.

Then, too, there’s the difference in winning in Magic. In Magic, you want to win each game, and it doesn’t matter how close the games are. You won the round 2-0? Good. You advance in to the next elimination round, or you get that much closer to the Top 8. The goal is to win.

In Poker, the goal is to win money. Each hand has a different value, because unlike Magic it’s entirely possible for you to lose every game all night, except for the big pot that really matters. In Magic, there’s no reward for going, “Wow, I can see from the tilt of my opponent’s head here that he’s got a strong hand; I’d better fold and cut my losses.” If you fold, you lose. You might as well just play it out.

There’s something to be gained in poker by drawing a game out and getting your opponents to overcommit, but in Magic your goal is to smash the other guy flat as soon as humanly possible every time. Which means the only times that tells matter are where you’re trying to make a judgment call based on something your opponent could do that might wreck you, and you’re not sure.

But a lot of that involves no tells at all.

You know what? If I have three creatures out and my opponent passes turn 6 with six lands untapped in Time Spiral Limited and four cards in hand, I don’t consider that a “tell.” That’s just reading the board.

It has nothing to do with how he’s slouching or sitting. Generally, with that many cards in his fingers, I’ll assume that my opponent has something that he’s ready to cast on my turn when I send in my boys: the question is, what is it, and do I have answers for it?

Unlike Poker, my punishment for misreading my opponent’s hand is zilch. Maybe I’m wrong here, and he is genuinely screwed; maybe he has a Kaervek the Merciless, a Lim-Dul the Necromancer, an Avatar of Woe, and a Bogardan Hellkite stranded in hand, all uncastable with six lands. Maybe he has four lands.

Who cares?

It’s rare that a good player isn’t going to chance doing something in this circumstance, since the punishment you would normally get for being bluffed successfully (“I’ll skip my next attack, avoiding doing six points of damage and giving you another turn to draw an actual answer!”) is usually worse than the punishment you would normally get for attacking (“I’ll send my guys in and meet a Crookclaw Transmuter that you would have cast eventually anyway!”).

Those aren’t tells. That’s just intuiting the oft-complex game state of Magic in the way that it should be intuited, and that has nothing to do with your opponent’s psychological reaction. This very weekend, Takuya Osawa successfully guessed that his opponent had a big nasty spell in wait because Jim Herold kept laying land when he had a Conflagrate in the graveyard. As Craig Jones notes, “Why was [Herold] laying land he didn’t seem to need?” As such, he did not activate his Phyrexian Totem to get seared by the dragon, which would have been game.

That’s not a tell. That’s watching the game.

As the overall groundswell of talent created by MODO has shown time and time again, if tells were critical to Magic, then players who were good on faceless ol’ Magic Online wouldn’t be much good in real life. Ain’t the case.

That said, I’m not trashing the idea of tells. It’s good to be able to read your opponent in real life, and there’s a reason why many of Magic’s pros have made the effortless transition to Poker. And there are certainly many games that come down to knowing whether your opponent has the trick.

The question is this: Would the time you would need to invest to become really good at reading random tells be better spent upon learning tells, or upon improving some other aspect of your game play?

I don’t have a clear answer. But I always think of Mike Long. Mike’s by far the best player in the game at cheap psychological ploys, and he did pretty well in getting under the skin of his opponents by rattling them. I’m no fan of Mike thanks to all the cheating issues floating about, but I also think that if you can shake your opponent up enough to lose, then that’s a valid approach.

But low-level jerks all over have emulated Mike’s style, being purposely grating and insulting in order to throw their opponents. And aside from Mike way back when, it really hasn’t led to success. The successful trash-talking at the finals of the Pro Tours hasn’t emerged.

Why?

My suspicion is that trash-talking does give you a distinct edge. But it takes time properly hone your opponent-jarring skills, and every instant you spend working on flummoxing your opponent is a moment that you’re not developing some other critical skill in Magic — say, developing your knowledge of tempo or learning how the cards best interact — and I think that costs people more than it helps them.

But then again, I’m a weaselly person myself. I like reading people. I like playing people. And I’m not willing to say that tells are useless; rather, there are better things you could spend your time on.

But that said, let’s ask the question: If you play in real life, how often do you use tells in Magic — which is defined here as “reading your opponent’s reactions properly to determine whether they have a strong or weak hand”? Would you consider it a must-have skill, or is one of those things that’s nice to have? Tell me how accomplished you are in Magic, and what percentage of your success you attribute to your amazing tell-reading skills.

I’m curious as to your responses.

The Weekly Plug Bug
My webcomic Home on the Strange returns this week with fresh takes on future events in Firefly/Serenity, Harry Potter, and — on Monday — Heroes. Take a look!

Signing off,
The Ferrett
TheFerrett@StarCityGames.com
The Here Edits This Site Here Guy