In June of 2019, I ran an essay contest. I'll be posting some of these submissions on this blog. Here's the second post from one of the winners. This is from Mike Lynch, of the U.K. How Zachary Elwood's books and videos have improved my poker game by Mike Lynch Believe me, Zach’s books are the poker equivalent of the Klondyke – “there’s gold in them thar pages.” Each and every page carries ...
Testimonial for Zach Elwood’s poker tells books and videos: Essay #1
In June of 2019, I ran an essay contest. I'll be posting the four winners of these on the blog. Here's the first one. This is from Keith Troell. How Zachary Elwood's books and videos have improved my poker game by Keith Troell Here's a tell from the Exploiting Poker Tells book that has repeatedly saved me a fortune. It's "Hand #99: Bet hesitation is a sign of strength." This river tell is ...
Free excerpt from Exploiting Poker Tells
I'm currently offering a free 24-page PDF excerpt from Exploiting Poker Tells, my 2017 poker tells book. You can get for free by clicking the button below and putting $0 where it says Name a price. Get the free PDF About the book Exploiting Poker Tells is the third and final book in my poker tells series; I don't plan on writing another one. I'm proud of this book because I think it gives a ...
New poker tells book cover ideas
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. ...
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 ...
New Live $1-2 Poker Tells Book
I recently put out a new short ebook that analyzes 35 actual $1-2 NLHE cash game hands, most of which I played myself, but a few are from some $1-2 video footage. The book is called Reading Poker Tells in $1-2 No-Limit Cash Games, and it's available on my site here (in three ebook file formats, including Kindle) and in the Kindle store here. It's only $10 and I think this is a great way to get ...
Well-known poker players and celebrities featured in Verbal Poker Tells book
During research for writing the book Verbal Poker Tells, I watched and took notes on around 100 hours of poker footage, with a focus on verbal behavior. Poker footage I watched included: the WSOP Main Events, Poker After Dark, High Stakes Poker, European Poker Tour events, PokerStars' The Big Game, and the Heartland Poker Tour. In the book, I used verbatim transcriptions of interesting ...
Recent Vegas Trip and Poker Tells Seminar
I went to Vegas last week for a week, mainly for the poker tells seminar I was doing, but also to play some poker and do some promotional stuff for the book. (If you haven't heard about the poker tells presentation I'm doing, here's a PokerNews article talking about it: http://learn.pokernews.com/news/2014/06/poker-tells-seminar-at-wsop-makes-use-of-unique-behavioral-d-4355.htm.) The seminar ...
Poker trip to Los Angeles, observing verbal behavior
I spent a week in L.A. at the end of February, playing poker and appearing in a couple episodes of the live-streaming poker show Live at the Bike. I played primarily $5-5 and $5-10 NLHE cash games. I haven’t played much at all in the last few years, so it was an interesting and educational trip, getting back into playing all the time and seeing how people were playing at these stakes. I’d also ...
Working on a new poker tells book
I'm working full-time on another poker tells book. The book will be called Verbal Poker Tells and will focus specifically on all things verbal at the poker table: the things people say and how they say them. It will use a lot of examples from actual hands, both televised and hands played by me and others. I've been collecting a fairly large database of verbal patterns and will use this database to ...
Guest blog post from poker player Daniel Steinberg
I received an interesting email from Daniel Steinberg, who's an ex-poker-pro with some very good online and live results. He’s obviously got a lot of poker experience, so his opinions are worth listening to. I've included some of my responses to him in-line with his email. ...
Immediate calls – a badly written chapter of my book
A reader, David Monath, sent me an email about my book Reading Poker Tells yesterday, pointing out some inconsistencies in the “Speed of calling” chapter, specifically what I say about immediate calls and what they mean. I wanted to address the inconsistencies here for the benefit of people who read the book. ...
I’m interviewed on High Roller Radio, a poker podcast
I was contacted by Derrick from the High Roller Radio Show, an "online gambling and poker magazine", asking me to do an interview. Click here for a link to the page with my interview. I think it went really well. Prior to the interview, I consumed half a milligram of Lorazepam and about a shot of Grand Marnier and that seemed to put me in a really good spot. Derrick asked some really good ...
Reading Poker Tells e-book now available
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
Poker tells in limit hold’em: A critique of my book by Philip Newall
I’ve been reading Philip Newall’s book The Intelligent Poker Player (published by TwoPlusTwo). His book is about game theory optimal strategy, and is especially applicable to short-handed and heads-up limit Hold’em. I plan on writing a review of it soon, but in the meantime I’ll just say that I recommend it. Not only does he talk about strategy, he also has really good advice on playing poker for ...
Some new book cover concepts
My designer sent me some concepts for the cover that I'd like to share and get feedback on. Keep in mind they're very rough, just to give the general concept. You can click on an image in the gallery below to see it fullscreen. If there's one direction of the following pics you like, please let me know in the comments area or just Tweet at me or email me. Or if you have any other ideas, I'd love ...
A hand using poker tells – an introduction to the book
A friend of mine told me I should have a dramatic hand to start the book with, to show an example of using tells in practice, and to get people's attention. I thought it was a good idea. I have a bunch of notes of hands I've played from a long time ago, and I thought the hand I finally decided on was a good one. This is from a hand I played in 2005 in Albuquerque, NM. Names have been changed to ...
New poker tells book almost done
The book is getting close to being done. It’s working title is currently ‘Reading Poker Tells’. Maybe I’ll throw on a secondary subtitle; something like, "and other psychological tools". I’ve sent out the current version of the manuscript to several poker friends for comments, and I’m awaiting their reviews. The main thing I want to do is to communicate the concepts in a simple, easy-to-understand ...
Some tells in a $5-10 no-limit game
I went to Spirit Mountain Casino (in Grand Ronde, Oregon) this past weekend to study the difference between no-limit tells across a range of three different stakes: $1-3, $2-5, and $5-10. I wanted to do this because I'd been working on some chapters for the book related to how tells differ across stakes and between limit and no-limit. I'll tell you a few interesting observations I made on the ...
Photos for poker tells book
The photo shoot was last Thursday and everything went even better than I expected. The photographer did a fantastic job, and so did all of my actors/poker players. I've now got a lot of photos to wade through to find the best ones. I've also got a lot of editing to do on the manuscript. All-in-all, I estimate I'll have it ready to be sent to the book designer within a couple months. ...