I've finally got the Reading Poker Tells e-book up for sale here. I've got it available as a zipped file that includes all three major formats: PDF, EPUB, and MOBI. This is what I've seen several other sites do. I've been told it offers the most convenient way for people to view the e-book on any e-reader or device they may have, whether it's the Kindle, the iPad, the Nook, or whatever else ...
Review of Christopher Dillingham’s Dissecting Pinocchio
Christopher Dillingham's "Dissecting Pinocchio" is a good book on lie detection. Dillingham is a police officer who's well-versed in interrogations, and you can tell from his stories that he has a lot of experience to back up his observations. He also talks about studies that have been done about lie detection. The best thing about this book is the author's realism about lie detection. There ...
Review of Philip Newall’s The Intelligent Poker Player
In order to review Philip Newall’s book The Intelligent Poker Player in an accurate and practical way, I must reveal that I am very far from being a great limit poker player. (I could extrapolate to no-limit poker, but let me humble myself a little bit at a time.) I want to be honest about the weaknesses in my game so that players who are decent but not great at limit poker (people like myself) ...
I’m interviewed on Badugi Allstars poker podcast
The boys at Badugi Allstars interviewed me on their poker podcast. Talk included: Why I wrote the book What makes my book different from other poker tells books The importance of correlating tells with specific situations Some discussion on the common tell of defensive chip handling Dissing Joe Navarro and Mike Caro (respectfully) Penis-shaped doughnuts (it's a Portland, Oregon ...
More poker tells in Rounders (besides KGB’s Oreo)
Hi, I'm Zach Elwood, the author of the book Verbal Poker Tells (amongst other poker tells projects). This is my blog. My email acquaintance Michael Blinder recently wrote to point out something very awesome in the movie Rounders. Both Teddy KGB and Mike McDermott (Matt Damon’s character) exhibit a few poker tells besides the infamous Oreo cookie one. Both of them exhibit a kind of poker tell I ...
Trying to influence villain to call or fold (false tells)
A guy emailed me about a hand where he tried to give a false poker tell of strength (showing his neighbor his cards) to get a guy to fold to his all-in flop bet. He described himself as playing in a high-stakes home game. His email led to a discussion about how smart it is to try to influence your opponents in such a way. ...
Immediate calls are usually a drawing hand
Immediate calls tell you a lot. In my experience, they polarize someone's hand range to either super-strong or a vulnerable hand like a decent draw or top pair weak kicker. Most often, though, it will be a draw. In this $15-30 limit hand, the guy's immediate call lets you narrow his hand range a lot. I have [As] [Ks] and raise UTG. I get one fairly tight player calling me in the BB. He is ...
Silence in previously talkative guy equals discomfort
A few of us in the $15-30 game had been talking about the local school systems, with most of us even talking while we were playing hands. It was a kill pot, so it became $30-60, and this one guy who had been talking a lot, raised it under-the-gun. There was a slight confusion about something, and the floor was called to figure it out. In this interim, the raiser was completely quiet and seemed ...
Genuinely angry call means weakness
This post and the next few posts will be an assortment of behavioral poker tells that helped me in my last $15-30 limit session. I wanted to share them and also write about them in the interest of helping me use them better in a session. Sometimes I get good tells but I don’t fully know the best strategy to make the best use of them. ...
Betting motion behaviors in limit
I've been playing a $15-30 limit game, with a little bit of $20-40, the last few days. I had a few hands I wanted to talk about that pertain to betting motion speed and tendencies. Now that my book has gone to the printers, I've been having a lot of second-guessing and doubting of the way I phrased some things in the book. This is bound to happen, and I try not to beat myself up too much, because ...