Bluffing in poker is the art of making opponents believe that your hand is stronger than it actually is. This strategic move is designed to induce opponents to fold their hands, thereby increasing your chances of winning the pot. It’s a tactic that involves risk, prediction, and a deep understanding of the game dynamics.
Source
What is the best way to spot a bluff in poker?
Do you know why the best poker players are the best? They avoid all the common tells. They are silent, preventing people from reading their voice or manner of speech. They don't act quickly but at about the same speed for all hands. They don't show emotions when losing, they don't bet too large. All of those are common tells among players, but many professional players don't show them. Watch a pro poker tourney, and you won't know unless you are shown the cards. The players stare at one another and try to read the other's face for tiny tells, and every player is different. A good player might manage to read the tells and signs on many, but no strategy works on all players - and you would need a strategy that works on all players to be the best. But there is not.
Watch for example the recent Scandinavia Open finals. Early on in the stream, a player is bluffing, but there is almost no tell. In general, it's nigh impossible to read any of the players. Shades, hats, facemasks, deliberate bored looks, hands in the face or on specific spots, playing with the chips in a repeatable and consistent manner, avoiding eye contact - all methods to increase the difficulty of being read. Watch this interaction: there's no change in behavior between before and after the cards are dealt and during the play: the click of Ondrej's chips getting stacked and restacked is almost constant in speed, his face has the same bored look and tilt as the whole 3 hours before, there's no posture change or chatter, he's just that good.
As such, there can not be a best strategy to spot bluffs, only better or worse ones.
Every person is different, every person has their own little quirks and importantly their own comfort level. As such every person has their own unique set of combinations of physical and or metaphysical tells.
I think it is also very important to stress to you that you are likely not part of the extremely unique club of people who can understand the tiny aspects of body language. I can't recall the exact figure but I recall reading before that the percentage of the population who truly understand the tiny nonverbal communications, i.e. a micro tick of an eye for an example, is less than 0.1% of the population. Again I may be misremembering the exact number, but it's a small percentage. I believe it was from a former FBI nonverbal communications expert Joe Navarro who mentioned it.
I mention this, initially, as unless a person is overtly giving very large physical tells don't place much emphasis on things like, "well I saw they moved a chip 1 cm to the left, and then an eye twitch, so therefore they must not have it". Players who place too much importance on these micro physical tells are for the most part extremely losing players, as they will convince themselves to make terrible plays and calls ignoring poker fundamentals chasing their tells.
However, with the above said, it would be naive to also say that people don't have physical and metaphysical tells that are obvious. Of course, anyone who has been playing poker for awhile, will be more likely to be aware these common tells and more mindful about controlling their body. There is also the aspect of reverse tells, I myself have regularly used, against players who think they are Daniel Negreanu, reverse tells to make them believe I'm weak when I'm strong, and same visa versa.
So there is no best way, but there are a series of shared human physical ticks that are more common and not necessarily unique. I cannot list as there are too many. There are plenty of books for this, some just dedicate sections of their books to tells, others are entirely based on tells.
Bonus (never read but heard about it):
The points I'm trying to make here is don't look for a short cut and place too much emphasis on poker tells, especially not over solid poker fundamentals. It's too vast, and impossible to narrow down to a single best way as you're asking for. There is no single best way, the best way is to play with the person, understand and pay attention to what they did, showed and outcome. As an example, did they have happy feet (involuntarily shacking a leg/s), when they had happy feet how did they bet, did they show their cards, what were they, did they do it when they had good cards or bad cards, did they win, when did they start having happy feet, was it when they were bluffing or was it when they hit the nuts, etc, etc!
Even when you believe someone has a physical tell that is reliable, again I cannot stress this enough, don't disregard solid poker understanding, reason and fundamentals. Just because you believe someone has a tell, does not make it a winning decision long term to player 6,9 off, out of position because you believe if you see player do x you know you can raise the turn and win.
