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 ...
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 ...
Review of poker tells training from Galvin Bay
The following is a review for my poker tells video series sent in by Galvin Bay. Galvin is a professional poker player who currently plays in Macau games. He has also written some poker books (like The Art of Poker) and created poker training videos. Below he gives a review and also some notes on his experience with a couple specific tells. ...
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 ...
The Poker Guys’ The Breakdown videos focus on behavior from televised poker
Jonathan Levy and Grant Denison are two Portland, Oregon-area pro poker players. I first met Jonathan playing some $20-40 Limit Hold’em up in Washington state, as you can often find him doing. For the past year or so, he and Grant have been doing a weekly poker podcast and videos that analyze hands from televised poker footage. They call themselves The Poker Guys and they've named their weekly ...
Hosting a new 2+2 poker tells/behavior forum
Do you know the Two Plus Two poker forum? It's a great place to get poker news and discuss poker hands. I've been a member on there since my first days of playing poker in college in 2000. I still remember reading strategy posts from Greg Raymer years before he ever won the WSOP Main Event. (Yes, I'm old.) Mason Malmuth is the co-owner of 2+2, along with David Sklansky. They've written and ...
New poker tells video series
So the last few months I've been working on a new video series, which I've titled Reading Poker Tells Video. I partnered with Chicago's Windy City Poker Championships, run by Kirk Fallah, so I could use the footage from their cash games and tournaments to make instructional training videos about poker behavior and tells. The last few months I've been watching their footage, analyzing it, and ...
What is Beyond Tells?
Beyond Tells is a poker tells video training series created by Blake Eastman. Earlier this year, I interviewed Blake and wrote an article for PokerNews about BeyondTells. We discussed his background, his interest in poker behavior and behavior in general, and his process of analyzing the poker game footage they collected. I get a lot of people asking for my opinion on the series but I haven't ...
Some recent poker tells articles
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 ...
Talking to John Wood, mental game coach
John Wood recently reached out to me to do a short interview for a site called PokerHeadrush. You can read the interview here. Things we discussed included: the general usefulness of live reads, the importance of the mental game in poker, and the poker scene in Portland. John is a general mental/life coach who also coaches poker players. He's worked with poker players Alex Fitzgerald and Chris ...
Free Poker Tells Videos
Update: In June of 2015 I released a poker tells video series, available here: www.readingpokertells.video. The series currently consists of 16 videos and I will be adding more in future. Click on the site link above to watch a trailer for the video. You can even buy the videos individually. Right now, my Reading Poker Tells YouTube channel has 10 free instructional videos focused on different ...
Poker pro Davidi Kitai talks about poker tells
In a PokerNews interview of respected Belgian poker pro Davidi Kitai, poker journalist Remko Rinkema conducts a short interview of Kitai on the subject of poker tells. If you're not familiar with him, here is Kitai's Wikipedia page. Here’s a quick synopsis of the few points Kitai makes in the interview: ...
Poker tells at a Chicago poker tournament
This past weekend I went to a Windy City Poker charity tournament in Chicago. I played a couple interesting hands that featured a good amount of reliable poker tells, which I’ll share below. The tournament was a $1,000 buy-in one; it got about 50 players. It had one featured table, with RFID sensors and camera coverage, that switched players once every hour. The episodes didn’t stream live but ...
A couple televised poker hands and analysis
The following is an email from Thomas Hutchinson, a reader of my books, interspersed with my responses: "Firstly I just want to say thank you very much for writing both Verbal Poker Tells and Reading Poker Tells, I have read both books cover to cover many times and would consider them the best poker tell books out on the market at the moment. So thanks again :) I have a couple of questions which ...
WSOP mention & early-hand ostentatious behavior
I got a few texts from friends the other night, telling me I’d gotten another shout-out from Norman Chad on the latest WSOP episode. Here’s the clip below; the hand starts at 29:30: Dan Smith goes to raise with Qc 9c and drops a chip. He smiles sheepishly and says emphatically, "Terrible omen; I'm going to make it 90 thousand anyway." He then slams down his chips in an exaggerated ...
Poker Tells Webinar on September 25th
I'm doing a live poker tells webinar on September 25th at 6pm PST (9pm EST). It costs $55. Tickets are on sale now on this page: www.readingpokertells.com/poker-tells-webinar. The webinar is basically the same presentation I did live in Las Vegas this past summer. The response to those seminars was very positive. You can read some attendee testimonials here: ...
Jason Lavallee on immediate bets being polarizing
Kristy Arnett interviewed Canadian poker pro Jason Lavallee in 2013 for PokerNews (click here for full audio interview.) In the audio interview, he talked about a queen-high call-down he made in a European Poker Tour event. His opponent's bet-timing played a role in his decision. Basically, he thought that an immediate bet meant that her range was polarized, because most players don't know what to ...
Jonathan Little: Paying attention to opponent behavior
The following is a guest blog post from Jonathan Little. Little is a two-time WPT champion with over $5,000,000 in career earnings. He is the owner of the training site FloatTheTurn.com and is the author of numerous best-selling poker books. You can follow him on twitter @JonathanLittle. Jonathan is running a series of live seminars during the 2014 WSOP with poker tells author Zachary Elwood. ...
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 ...
A Live Tell in 2-7 Triple Draw
This following is a guest blog post from Los Angeles poker player Josh Hale. You can follow Josh Hale on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/red_stagg. The Los Angeles Poker Classic just concluded and with it, one of my favorite times of the year for poker. I count myself amongst the many people consider the LAPC to be one of the best tournament series of year (perhaps second only to the WSOP) ...
Players who get more relaxed and talkative when winning
An acquaintance of mine emailed me this story from his home game. This is a small stakes home game: .10 Euro blinds, NLHE. My response follows his email. There's something I realized last saturday. We were playing six handed and of the guys was winning big time. Let's call him Robert. He hit every hand, was paid off every time, it was just his evening. Normally, he is one the more losing ...
A Queen-high call down involving immediate bets from an opponent
I saw this PokerNews story where Kristy Arnett interviewed Jason Lavallee, the winner of this year's PokerStars European Poker Tour London High Roller, about a Queen high call-down he made on the final table of that tournament. Here's the story: http://www.pokernews.com/strategy/strategy-with-kristy-jason-lavallee-discusses-a-queen-high-c-16743.htm ...
Analysis of Sylvain Loosli’s potential poker tells in 2013 WSOP Main Event
In this post, I’m going to describe my analysis of Sylvain Loosli that I did prior to and during the 2013 WSOP Main Event final table. I had been hired by Amir Lehavot to analyze his opponents and himself for possible behavioral leaks. The point of this post is not just to talk about how I went about trying to find patterns in Loosli and what those patterns may have been, it’s also to talk about ...