This is just to mention that I started a Substack blog that I'll be occasionally adding to. If you're interested, please read the details about it here. ...
Steve Zolotow’s favorite poker hand, which includes some tells
You may know poker player Stephen Zolotow: he has appeared on quite a few televised poker shows. Zolotow wrote this piece for Cardplayer Magazine about his favorite hand. I wanted to write a few comments about the behavior-related stuff he wrote about. (Also, Zolotow's piece is worth a read for some good explanations of why tells can be so valuable in general: basically, that many poker ...
Interviews about poker tells
Here are some interesting interviews I've done on the subject of poker tells: A talk with Dara O'Kearney about poker tells. Dara is the co-host of The Chip Race podcast. He talks about how his understanding of poker tells changed over his poker career, and a few anecdotes of interesting spots where tells came into play. Link: ...
Pro poker player Brandon Sheils discusses his poker tells research project
On a recent People Who Read People podcast episode, I interviewed Brandon Sheils, a pro poker player who recently did a study on poker tells as part of his getting a Masters in Psychology. Brandon is a pro poker player and coach. You can see Brandon's poker-focused YouTube channel here and his Twitter @brandonsheils here. I was interested to interview Brandon because I had helped him out a bit ...
Podcast episodes about nonverbal and verbal behavior in sports and games
This is a compilation of all the episodes of my People Who Read People podcast that are related to understanding psychology and behavior in games and sports. Game/sports-related episodes: Poker tells: A talk with Brian Koppelman, writer of Rounders, Billions, and more: We talk about how he got into poker, his interest in deciphering human behavior and finding clues, poker tells in ...
What is Phil Hellmuth’s “white magic”? Can we define it?
Phil Hellmuth often talks about his "white magic," which is how he categorizes the unique edge that he has on other poker players. Hellmuth often claims he's "the best" but at the same time he is often disrespected by strong players. Hellmuth's promotion of his "white magic" is his way of saying "You don't understand my mysterious and unseen powers." I do think that there are certain things ...
Dr. Jack Brown, a so-called “behavior expert”, is spreading bad information
In September of 2023, I did a podcast episode about Jack Brown, which contains more information. Listen to that here. Dr. Jack Brown claims to be a "body language expert". His Twitter is @DrGJackBrown and his website is www.bodylanguagesuccess.com. His Twitter bio reads "Body Language & Emotional Intelligence Expert, Speaker, Physician, Lecturer." As of October 2022, he has 175,000 Twitter ...
Next Generation Poker app makers find surprising result for best Omaha hand
I talked to Andrew Emory the other day. Emory is the creator of Next Generation Poker, an application for tracking live poker sessions (how much won and lost and similar info) and hand analysis (inputting hands played and learning about hand equity and range equity). It's available for iOS and coming soon for Android. A few interesting things about this: Best hand in Omaha? They ran ...
Doug Polk makes big fold versus Hellmuth: a poker tells examination
Not familiar with my poker tells work? Here's an introduction. This will be some thoughts about Hellmuth's behavior from a much-discussed hand from a March 2021 High Stakes Poker episode, in which Doug Polk and Hellmuth both flopped straights and Polk folded his lower straight to a big reraise shove from Hellmuth. The tells analysis will use concepts from my book Verbal Poker Tells, which is ...
Criticisms of Michael Slepian’s Stanford study on poker tells and hand movements (published 2015)
The following is reposted from a 2015 piece I wrote for Bluff magazine. It was originally located at this URL but has become unavailable due to Bluff going out of business. I saw this study mentioned recently in Maria Konnikova's book 'The Biggest Bluff' and was reminded about this piece and noticed it was offline, so I wanted to share it again. A few notes on this piece: The original title ...