Here are some interesting interviews I've done on the subject of poker tells: A talk with Dara O'Kearney about poker tells. Dara is the co-host of The Chip Race podcast. He talks about how his understanding of poker tells changed over his poker career, and a few anecdotes of interesting spots where tells came into play. Link: ...
What is Phil Hellmuth’s “white magic”? Can we define it?
Phil Hellmuth often talks about his "white magic," which is how he categorizes the unique edge that he has on other poker players. Hellmuth often claims he's "the best" but at the same time he is often disrespected by strong players. Hellmuth's promotion of his "white magic" is his way of saying "You don't understand my mysterious and unseen powers." I do think that there are certain things ...
Dr. Jack Brown, a so-called “behavior expert”, is spreading bad information
In September of 2023, I did a podcast episode about Jack Brown, which contains more information. Listen to that here. Dr. Jack Brown claims to be a "body language expert". His Twitter is @DrGJackBrown and his website is www.bodylanguagesuccess.com. His Twitter bio reads "Body Language & Emotional Intelligence Expert, Speaker, Physician, Lecturer." As of October 2022, he has 175,000 Twitter ...
Criticisms of Michael Slepian’s Stanford study on poker tells and hand movements (published 2015)
The following is reposted from a 2015 piece I wrote for Bluff magazine. It was originally located at this URL but has become unavailable due to Bluff going out of business. I saw this study mentioned recently in Maria Konnikova's book 'The Biggest Bluff' and was reminded about this piece and noticed it was offline, so I wanted to share it again. A few notes on this piece: The original title ...
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 ...
Email from reader: His favorite and most useful poker tell
Below is an edited email from a reader, Jeremy G of California, who wrote about the content of mine he'd found most useful. I wanted to share this because I agree with him; I think verbal tells are very important in your average low to mid-stakes cash games, where there is a good amount of loose during-hand talking from not-very-aware players. And I agree with him that this stuff is powerful, once ...
Analysis of Brett Kavanaugh and Mark Judge denials about Ford allegations
This piece will look at some statements of Brett Kavanaugh and Mark Judge pertaining to the Dr. Christine Ford allegations. Kavanaugh's statements discussed in this piece come from the Sept 24th Fox News interview of Kavanaugh and his wife (video below). I find Kavanaugh's denials in this interview weak and evasive for these main reasons: Kavanaugh spends barely any time talking about his ...
Reading player behavior in game Secret Hitler
I played Secret Hitler for the first time the other night. It was a lot of fun. We only played a total of four games, so I'm admittedly far from an expert, but I wanted to post a few thoughts I had about potential tells (i.e., behavioral patterns) in this game. Silence and talkativeness. One major imbalance of beginner players is in talking a lot more when they're the good guys (the liberals) ...
Some statement analysis of Chris Watts interview
I decided to delete this analysis from here and repost it on Medium. ...
My new podcast: “People Who Read People”
So after thinking about it for a few years, on and off, I've finally gotten around to doing my own podcast. One of the things that motivated me was doing an interview of esteemed poker player Brian Rast recently. We talked about his thoughts on poker tells and on starting out learning mixed games. The stuff he was saying was so interesting that I started again thinking, "I should get a podcast up ...
Thoughts on “more/less likely” phrasing in poker tells content, and on unexamined blind spots
For a long time, I've been doing a bad job phrasing a very basic and integral poker tells concept. For a long time, I sometimes have used the shorthand phrasing "more likely" or "less likely" to refer to how behavior might affect the likelihood of a player having a strong hand or a bluff, and this bad phrasing on my part has led to unnecessary ambiguity and confusion on part of readers/viewers. ...
Charlie Carrel talks about tells in a One Drop hand
Recently, on the poker podcast The Chip Race, with hosts Dara O'Kearney and David Lappin, poker player Charlie Carrel talked about a hand he played in the 2017 WSOP Europe One Drop $111K buy-in event. This hand involved some exploitative live reads Charlie made. The full audio of that podcast episode can be found on Youtube (also here's an iTunes link to the podcast episodes). You can follow The ...
Why do pro poker players have reliable verbal tells?
The following is on a topic that people ask me about fairly frequently. Essentially: "Why do so many players, including many skilled players, try to verbally manipulate their opponents in ways that can seem so predictable?" Related to this is the question: "These players must perceive an advantage to this behavior/manipulation or they wouldn't do it; what is the advantage they ...
Thoughts on the whole “Cate Hall owns Mike Dentale grudge match” event
I didn’t want to watch the Cate Hall vs Mike Dentale “grudge match” thing. I didn’t really care; I’d only followed a little bit of their online Twitter drama. I hoped Cate won and was pleased to see she did, but as to the actual match, I didn’t have any interest. I finally ended up watching recently, seven months after it was played, mainly because I hadn’t watched much televised poker lately, ...
WSOP prep: Some poker tells from the World Series of Poker
It's World Series of Poker time, and I know many people are making the trek to Vegas right now or very soon. I thought I'd throw together a few fun hands from the WSOP that feature some generally reliable poker tells. In this email, I've got the following hand histories. These are all taken from my new Exploiting Poker Tells book (ebook available here, paperback available on Amazon). Will ...
Talking with Marvin Karlins: Writer of Read ‘Em and Reap
Marvin Karlins has had a long career as a business professor, a consultant and trainer for airline companies, and a writer and cowriter of numerous books and articles, many related to gambling and/or psychology. In the poker world, his biggest claim to fame is that he was the author of the book Read 'Em and Reap, along with his co-writers Joe Navarro and Phil Hellmuth. I talked to Marvin ...
Trumped! memoir tells tale of Donald Trump’s Atlantic City past
I recently read the memoir Trumped! (Amazon link), which was released in 1991 by one of Trump’s highest Atlantic City casino executives, John R. O’Donnell. O’Donnell spent three years working under Trump, from 1987-1990. I thought putting a book review of this book on my poker blog would be fitting, because the book talks so much about gamblers and the casino strategies on how to lure them in. ...
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 ...
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 ...
Gambling and suicide in Atlantic City
Interesting article from recent Harpers Magazine called Getting To The End, Gambling and Suicide in Atlantic City. The writer, J.C. Hallman, spent five years dealing in Atlantic City and writes a short account of his remembrances of the many suicides that happened while he was there. The account is more experiential and literary than it is journalistic, but still an interesting read about the ...
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 ...
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 ...