Thoughts on inducing weak-hand statements from bettors
Some thoughts on when to ask "You got x hand?" of a bettor
Here's a video of me from a few years ago making a fold due to a verbal tell.
(Here’s a link to the YouTube video.)
If you've consumed my verbal poker tells content, you know his response is a weak-hand statement (a statement weakening his hand range) and those kinds of statements are highly correlated to strong hands. The main reasons being: bluffers don't want to remove strong hands from their ranges; value-bettors can have an incentive to remove strong hands from their ranges to try to make calls more likely.
I've written about that a lot but I thought there were some other interesting aspects of this that aren't obvious. Like, for example, why did I choose to ask about trip 5s and not some other hand?
When should one even ask this?
I seldom ask this question and I don't advocate often asking this question. In the several hours I played on that stream of theirs, this was (I'm pretty sure) the only time I asked it.
For one thing, the more you try such things, the more obvious it becomes that you’re seeking information. People who see you trying to induce verbal stuff even a couple times are more likely to be quiet. Whereas a rare use is more likely to go under radar as just idle “thinking out loud” type chatter.
Also, trying to verbally engage too often is a waste of time, from a politeness perspective.
I’d also use this based on certain player tendencies. I’d usually only ask this of people who I think are pretty talkative and have shown they're up for interacting. I’d be much less likely to use this on someone who I think is quite skilled and mostly stoic.
I would also usually reserve asking this in big pot situations. It's kind of a waste to use it for a small spot like this — but I think this was near the end of the session and I also thought this guy was willing to talk.
What’s the best hand to inquire about?
I wrote about this somewhere (either Verbal Poker Tells or Exploiting Poker Tells, or perhaps my video series; can't find it now): When you attempt to ask a question of a bettor to induce a weak-hand statement like this, you shouldn’t choose a very strong hand. You should choose something medium-strength.
The reason for this is: Asking about strong hands makes them consider more with more of their hand range. The stronger the hand you’re asking about, the more it implies that you yourself have a pretty strong hand. For example, to take an extreme example, say on this board I'd asked, "Do you have quad 5s?" With all his strong hands, that question will make him think, "Whoa, does he have a strong hand? Might he have a stronger hand? Might he have the same hand? Let me think about this for a second." (This kind of a thing is why immediate verbal responses related to hand strength of any sort will tend to mean strength.) Asking about stronger hands is just more thought provoking and puts up an obstacle to answering quickly and easily. Same in this situation if I'd asked him about a full house or a straight.
Asking about a decent-but-not-very-strong value hand more easily passes below the radar. With almost all his hands that beat me, he won’t mind denying a medium-strength hand.
In this case, I think asking about trip 5s was a mistake. It would’ve been better if I had asked about something weaker, like, "You got 9s?" That would have been better because trip 5s is a pretty likely hand for him when he bets. Also, if he did have trip 5s I likely wouldn’t have gotten any information-containing response from him. Asking "You got 9s?" would make him think: "Oh, he's maybe got 8s; if I say no, maybe he'll be set at ease and call."
So, to sum up: you should try to pick a medium-strength value hand that’s close to what you have.
Another reason asking about trips in this case was a bad choice, compared to asking about a pocket pair, is that there are many hands in his range that contain a five, whereas a specific pocket pair is a very small part of his possible range. Nevermind that based on the way he played it, 9s are quite unlikely in this specific case; the point is that the less % of his hand range the hand you ask about takes up, the easier it is for a player to deny it without thinking much about it.