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 #2
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 ...
Poker documentary shoot, and some hands from Vegas
This post will be about: A poker documentary shoot I was a part of that was shooting in Vegas Some interesting tournament hands from playing down there So a few weeks ago, I was invited to be a part of a documentary that features the multiple world champion boxer from London David Haye. The documentary is about Haye trying to become a pro-level poker player. So they invited me to be in ...
Chinese language poker tells video series
Galvin Bay is a pro poker player who lives in China. He's played high-stakes cash in Macau and elsewhere. You can see Galvin's poker blog here. He and other associates at a company called PokerMaster (扑克宗师), with my permission, took my poker tells/behavior video series and put Chinese-language (Mandarin) subtitles to them, and made them available on the WeChat platform. If you have influence ...
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 ...
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 ...
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. ...
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 ...
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. ...
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 ...
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 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 ...
Analyzing poker tells for Amir Lehavot at the 2013 WSOP Main Event
A couple weeks before the WSOP Main Event final table, I got an email from Amir Lehavot (founder of PokerWit.com and 3rd in this year's WSOP ME), asking if I’d be interested in helping him prepare for the final table. After discussing what I might be able to do to help him, and making sure we had similar expectations, I agreed. My role was to analyze existing footage of his opponents for possible ...
Reading Poker Tells book mentioned in 2013 WSOP
This year, during the World Series of Poker Main Event broadcast, my book Reading Poker Tells got a shout-out from Norman Chad. Here's the clip; go to the 1hr1m point if it doesn't automatically take you there. I'd sent a copy of Reading Poker Tells to Norman a few months ago, but I've sent out so many books over the past year to people (roughly $4,000 worth!) and haven't heard back from ...
Poker tells at live $1-2 no-limit
Update: Did you know I have a poker tells video series? Check it out here. In the past couple of weeks (November 2012), I played a few sessions of live $1-2 NLHE with the purpose of studying what poker tell information was the most important and relevant. It’d been a while since I played $1-2 (haven't been playing much at all lately with the exception of some $2-5 and the occasional $100+ ...
Guy Laliberte’s poker tells, Part 3: bet timing and leaning back in the chair
This is the third post in a series about Guy Laliberte's poker tells. This one will include a short analysis of Laliberte's bet timing tells. It's admittedly a small sample size, but what stands out is that when Laliberte chooses to bluff in a significant spot, it seems he is more likely to bet or raise quickly, within a few seconds. When he has a big hand, he is more likely to take a long time. ...
One Drop Tournament: Guy Laliberte’s poker tells
I spent the last couple days studying footage of Guy Laliberte playing poker. I started out studying the One Drop $1 million buy-in tournament final table footage, with the goal of picking up significant patterns Guy might have in significant hands. There were quite a few hands where Guy had strong hands and obviously wanted action. The problem was that there was really only one significant bluff ...
Chris Moneymaker getting a live read on Chris Oliver
I've been too busy to do many interesting blog posts lately, but I plan on doing some more in-depth televised poker analysis soon, on the level of what I did with the Pius Heinz WSOP 2011 footage. For now, I'll just post this video where it seems that Chris Moneymaker has a really good live read on his opponent Chris Oliver. This isn't just an interpretation; Moneymaker actually tells his "mental ...
Phil Ivey talks about poker tells
Phil Ivey recently sat for an interview (which is a rare thing) conducted by Nolan Dalla. Although it was just a few soft-ball questions (no mention of Full Tilt Poker stuff), it still gives a very interesting glimpse into Ivey's mind, in my opinion. He also talks a little bit about poker tells. ...
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 ...
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 ...