Players wearing sunglasses at the poker table is quite a common sight. If you look around a poker table, you will most likely see at least one person wearing a pair of sunglasses. And if you’re looking to get into online poker tournaments, you may wonder why it’s considered normal to sport sunglasses. In this article, we discuss some of the reasons why poker players wear them. Let’s take a look at the poker shades trend.
1. To disguise physical tells
The eyes reveal a lot about what someone is thinking and their reaction to the cards they are dealt. For instance, glancing at your chips, eye twitches or looking away from your opponent’s gaze could all be important giveaways at the poker table. If you’re wearing sunglasses, you can hide your eye habits. Playing poker with mirrored glasses will certainly conceal your eyes and prevent opponents from being able to try and read you. Of course, if you’re playing poker at an online casino from the comfort of your home, you will not need to wear sunglasses to hide your tells. However, you’ll be forgiven if you nonetheless decide to wear them just to complete your poker look!
2. To hide the fact that you’re reading your opponents’ tells
Whether you’re playing Texas Hold’em poker or any other poker variation, you actually need to stare at your opponents for a long time in order to gather information from their body language. You will get more confident reading people’s tells and body language the more you play in poker tournaments. If you don’t want your opponents to see that you’re trying to read their physical tells, a pair of poker glasses will surely make you discreet.
3. For an extra dose of confidence and comfort
Thanks to the 2003 poker boom, there are many new players in the world of poker, both in-person and online. This boom was, in part, due to the fact that the best online poker sites started to attract a new generation of players. This means that many poker players are not used to physically playing with other people. Wearing sunglasses to hide your eyes can act as a physical comfort if you feel intimidated by other players or if you are still finding your groove at an in-person poker table. If you want to avoid having conversations, sunglasses will also come in handy as a deterrent to casual chit-chat.
4. Avoid the bright lights
This may be an obvious one, but it is worth a mention. The lights inside a casino can be very bright and distracting during a poker game. Sunglasses will definitely help if you are sensitive to light or if the lights are simply too bright to bear.
5. To improve focus during a poker game
Wearing sunglasses can help you enter your ideal mental playing zone, which can prove to be advantageous to your overall gameplay. Some players believe that sunglasses prevent them from getting distracted. You will notice that some players enjoy small talk at the table. This could be overwhelming if you’re a beginner who is still getting used to playing with other people, so it helps to have something to filter the distractions.
Poker tournament strategy
Sunglasses or not, the best poker players know that a poker tournament strategy differs from the technique used when playing a cash game. Here are some poker tips to help develop a winning strategy.
- Always start slow: It is best to play modestly before the ante kicks in. This makes sense because even though you can’t win the tournament during the early stage, it is possible to lose a substantial amount, if not all your chips.
- Evaluate the potential of your hand: It’s helpful to know that the hand types that are best early on in the tournament, are those with the most post-flop potential.
- Practice patience: The speed at which the size of the blinds increases should influence how aggressive you are in the early stages of the tournament.
- Remember and understand your own position: Your position at the table will change over the course of the tournament as you progress through the different stages.
- Beware of making unnecessary loose calls: Doing so will definitely impact your ideal strategy around the bubble (the point of the game when most of the remaining players will win cash).
- Read other players: Lastly, you should be able to learn how to read other players’ tells, bluffs and traps.
Use these tips to become a successful poker player and see how your strategy evolves over time.
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