I'm getting close to finishing up the new poker tells (pre-order page here). I've been putting together some rough cover ideas. I'm using the style from my book Verbal Poker Tells. The images come from a couple photo shoots I did a few years ago. If anyone has any feedback on these, let me know. I'll soon be getting an artist involved. ...
Analysis of Will Kassouf’s “speech play” in 2016 WSOP Main Event
If you’ve been watching the World Series of Poker Main Event episodes this year (2016), you probably know who Will Kassouf is. He’s a talkative player who got a lot of coverage due to his constant chatter in hands. Not since Jamie Gold has a WSOP inspired such attention, and created such controversy, for his during-hand yapping. I've got a few pieces of content analyzing Kassouf's patterns and I'm ...
Will pay for strong hand histories featuring poker tells
So I'm currently working on my new poker tells book. It will be the third and final part of the trilogy that started with Reading Poker Tells and Verbal Poker Tells (and I'm also quite confident it will be the last book I write.) It will be called something like Reading Poker Tells: Practical Applications. Here's the pre-order page for it; it talks about the reasons why I wanted to write the book ...
Study looks at gaze direction tells in blackjack
An interesting study that took place a few months ago, where psychologist Kevin Holmes, at Colorado College, studied if there'd be gaze direction differences when study participants played blackjack. He did find differences: in short, participants looked slightly to their left when holding low-value hands, and more to the right the higher the hand's value became. An email subscriber of mine ...
Pre-order for new poker tells book available
I'm working on a new poker tells book, which will almost certainly be my last, focused on actual hands and practical applications. It'll probably be ready around the end of 2016. The working title is Reading Poker Tells: Practical Applications. You can pre-order the paperback (ebook included) for $45 USD in the U.S. and $55 outside of the U.S. Unlike my own previous books (and all other poker ...
Verbal poker tell at EPT High-roller event
A couple days ago, in the EPT 10K high-roller poker tournament, the following hand occurred: 10pm: Holz hero calls all-in, busts Level 26 - Blinds 30,000/60,000 (5,000 ante) Fedor Holz's extraordinary day is now over, with the young German making a pretty audacious call for his tournament life...and losing. Holz got things started with a limp from the cutoff (also under the gun) and both ...
New Yorker article on Bridge cheating scandal
A very interesting article from the most recent New Yorker about the Bridge cheating scandal. Besides detailing the scandal, it goes into detail about the tells/reads/nonverbal aspects of Bridge. Here's one paragraph talking about this aspect of Bridge: "Expert poker players often take advantage of a skill they call table feel: an ability to read the facial expressions and other unconscious ...
Reviews of poker tells training video series
There were a couple recent reviews written for my poker tells training series. I just wanted to post them here. The first comes from Alex Weldon, writing for PartTimePoker.com. He gives some positives and negatives for the videos. One of the things he says is: With Zach’s approach, after watching a few videos, you begin to feel confident that you’ll be able to guess what other actions mean... ...
Bet-sizing and speech, including weak-hand statement
Had an interesting hand yesterday where I maybe should have made a big hero fold based on a combination of bet-sizing and behavior. It's live $5-10. There's an UTG limp (from a guy who is known for limping big pairs first-in). The guy UTG+1, who is usually loose-passive, not often aggressive, and who has only $600 to start, makes it $30. The sizing is very reliable weakness ...
Stretched-lips facial expression when betting
I was working on a new video in my series. This one about the 'stretched-out lips' facial expression when seen from players making significant bets. I put together a little visual compilation from some of the hands I'm using in the video, below. Stretched-out lips communicate concern, so it's not surprising it mostly shows up from players with strong hands. Sometimes it shows up very quick, just a ...