Going back to my first casino tournament nearly 2 years ago, I can distinctly remember waiting until it was my action to look at my cards. I didn’t have any reason for this other than it seemed “professional”. 2 years later, and I’ve got a case for waiting and a case for looking early.
Playing online, you get to see your cards right away. This gives you time to make a decision or to react to other action. Sometimes, a good amount of time. Playing live, you could also have this same amount of time, as long as you look at your cards as soon as you get them.
For the 4th Gargoyle game of this season, I changed my strategy to start looking as soon as I got my cards. I found this to be very helpful as I did indeed have more time to make my decisions. However, a comment on my final hand of the evening caused me to re-evaluate, “I was going to raise, but I saw how determined your face was and knew you were going to do something there.” Huh, a poker tell from me? Interesting.
Reading that book on poker tells, there are a good number of them that describe “waiting for action tells”. This can indicate whether a player is going to fold their cards or put money into the pot with them. The section is mostly about how to exploit these tells, but there is also some basic advice about how to counteract these tells in your own play: Don’t look at your cards early.
For the 6th Gargoyle game of this season, I changed my strategy back to looking at my cards when the action was on me. I didn’t have too much trouble with this and was still able to make good decisions. As mentioned though, I did lose all of that decision making time.
Going back to the advice about not looking at your cards early, I feel that this advice is very one-sided. Instead, I think the right answer should be more like, “Be aware that if you look at your cards early that you may exhibit some of these tells.” Now that I know about them, I can make sure to try and keep myself as neutral as possible while still being able to work on my decision process.
As mentioned in a recent post of mine, I’ve been working on my hand reading ability. An unexpected benefit of not looking at my cards early was not being distracted by what decision I needed to make. Instead I was able to focus on hand reading (and tells).
So there you have it, justification for looking at you cards early, and justification for waiting until it’s your turn to act. I will continue to work on this area of my game to see what works best for me, but at least for now will probably continue to wait until it’s my turn to act before looking. Stupid tells!
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