I played professionally for a number of years. A lot of Internet and live. I also have a large number of friends from the scene as well.<p>That&#x27;s fine if you believe that, but it is possible to be a winning live player and not use tells. Tells being used are more anecdotes than typical situations that come up.<p>At live poker, the number of hands ranges from 15 to 30 per hour. Most hands don&#x27;t go to showdown, so you simply never get the information you need. Unless you are playing higher stakes with a smaller player pool, or a small home game, you may not have the same opponent at your table for a long time even if they&#x27;re a regular.<p>Giving off tells assumes that opponents are perceptive enough to notice, or naive enough to fall for overly obviously tells. This is asking too much for a lot of weaker opponents. And most people won&#x27;t be involved in the hand and paying attention.<p>The most useful &quot;tells&quot; may not even qualify as such. They&#x27;re usually weak or bad players trying their hand at bad acting in a way that tends to be obvious after you&#x27;ve played enough.<p>You also run into the problem that even amateurs can familiarize themselves with tells and try giving off &quot;reverse tells&quot; which reduces it to a game of &quot;leveling&quot;.<p>Most of the time the best decision is irrelevant of whatever behavior an opponent is perceived to be exhibiting. If I&#x27;m following through on a bluff against an opponent on a flush draw (comes 35% of the time if they see the turn and river), and their draw comes in and they sigh &quot;guess I&#x27;m beat&quot; and shove into me on the river, I can&#x27;t call with ten-high.