It is unlikely you'll get many responses in this thread by tomorrow night (as threads sometimes take a few weeks to build up some attention - although some might pick up quicker, or slower, than others), but sure I'll contribute to help out
Although I'm a fairly studious and determined player, I will preface my post by acknowledging that I have almost no live poker experience either. I wanted to visit a casino for live poker for my first time, but that is right about the time the pandemic hit - I still never played poker in a live casino...
What "experience" I do have is a lot of study/learning, played some live poker homegames and am a regular in cardschat
freerolls/poker leagues/events (online). All right, here is what I recommend:
1. Live tells are greatly over-rated in small-stakes games. The tables are filled with players giving off tells left and right, but it isn't too important because most players at this level aren't focusing on you - they are just focused on playing their own two cards and playing their own game. You will do much better by simply trying to minimize the tells YOU give off; many "postures" or "styles" work so long as you replicate the same thing for every hand (so no one can determine strength or weakness etc.), but again, most aren't looking at you anyway
2. If you have more time than just a day (prep for future poker perhaps?), then I recommend the book Read em And Reap by Joe Navaro and Phil Hellmuth for live tells information. The book is super well done and even has pictures to show what things to look out for. This book can be a powerful piece of information, but there is so much helpful content out there today, that I don't have any feelings on "hiding" resources like this - in today's poker era where so much quality content is available for learning (especially free and cheap resources online such as the cardschat community), it isn't about the availability of information, but rather the time and effort people invest (or choose not to put in) into actually improving, or learning from such resources.
3. Lastly, I'll post something "quick" that you can check out before your
poker game:
