With over $14M in live tournament winnings - including back-to-back wins in the WSOP $50K Poker Players Championship - Dan ‘Jungleman’ Cates has earned the right to share advice with the poker world.
In his latest ‘Thoughts From The Jungle’ video, dropped this week (see above), Cates gives his take on how to bluff better, live tells to watch out for, how he views the attitudes of fellow elite pros when it comes to deception at the table, and three tips for beginners interested in working on their bluffing game. He also shares an insider take on the status of poker as a mind sport.
Watch the video above now, or read on for an overview.
How useful are live tells?
Jungleman identifies various potential physical tells that could mean an opponent is bluffing, including the extent to which they are being still, how talkative they are during the hand when compared with their usual state, and whether or not their pulse is visibly faster.
But, he underlines, physical tells are unreliable, and tend to only be of help when viewed as part of a larger picture. Combining your observations of a person’s physical state with how you read their bet-sizing, bet timing, and their baseline approach - such as whether they are an especially ‘trappy’ player - will give you a clearer picture of the strength of their hand.
Poker as a mind sport
With so many players finding success online, where physical tells are not a factor, Cates believes a generation of elite players has taken to the game with more of a mind sport approach.
“Most poker players who are successful, in my experience, are not deceptive,” he says, adding that he believes a more professional approach has taken root, whereby skill is relied upon more than the ability to act deceptively. He goes on to defend poker’s status as a mind sport - a status recognized recently by the International Mind Sports Association, if not every regulatory body across the world.
“If we want [poker] to be more like a mind sport, versus something that is degenerate, we should make it more like it's doing something productive… exercising ourselves like an actual sport, but for our mind. And we should not do things that are completely pointless such as flipping, and also not be really predatory on people, because that's not what sports are for… We should step away from gambling and move it more closer to games such as chess.”
Jungle’s beginner tips
Cates closes out the video with three tips for beginners looking to improve their game:
- Get your preflop right
- Attack people’s weak ranges
- Think of hands in categories
These three short but sweet tips may seem obvious to more experienced players, but provide a solid grounding in how to start thinking about ranges.
Tip 4 is to ‘join the Jungleverse community' - Cates’ online training and community site. Details are available here, and via Cates’ YouTube channel and X account.
Additional image courtesy of Joe Giron/PokerPhotoArchive.com
