I’ve written a few articles on poker tells for some third-party sites recently that I’m pretty proud of. Here’s a synopsis and link to these articles.
A Theory About Early-Hand Ostentatious Behavior: This is a two-parter I wrote for PokerNews; the link takes you to the first one, and here’s the second part. Basically, these are based around the idea that players with strong hands, early in a hand when the pot is small, tend to be more focused and thoughtful. And players with very strong hands don’t like to draw attention to themselves. This means that most ostentatious behavior is exhibited by players with weak and medium-strength hands. These articles go into the reasons for this and gives some real-world poker footage examples to make the point.
Criticisms of the Stanford Poker Tells Study: This is an article I wrote for Bluff, in which I give some criticisms on the 2013 study by Michael Slepian et al at Stanford, in which they found that “smooth” betting motions were more correlated with strong hands. It’s a rather long article but I think the first couple of points I make are the strongest; the last half of the article is mainly just suggestions on how such studies could be done better.
Top Ten Poker Tells: I wrote this for poker community site Cardschat. While it’s a pretty short piece, I was proud of it because I think it fits a lot of my most recent and up-to-date thoughts on poker tells into a single, brief, and cohesive article. I think it’s a good primer for people new to thinking about poker tells and behavior and opponent psychology.
An Important Verbal Pattern: This is an article I wrote for All-in Magazine about verbal poker tells in general and specifically one verbal pattern that is one of the most useful ones.