You may know poker player Stephen Zolotow: he has appeared on quite a few televised poker shows. Zolotow wrote this piece for Cardplayer Magazine about his favorite hand. I wanted to write a few comments about the behavior-related stuff he wrote about. (Also, Zolotow's piece is worth a read for some good explanations of why tells can be so valuable in general: basically, that many poker ...
Doug Polk makes big fold versus Hellmuth: a poker tells examination
Not familiar with my poker tells work? Here's an introduction. This will be some thoughts about Hellmuth's behavior from a much-discussed hand from a March 2021 High Stakes Poker episode, in which Doug Polk and Hellmuth both flopped straights and Polk folded his lower straight to a big reraise shove from Hellmuth. The tells analysis will use concepts from my book Verbal Poker Tells, which 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 ...
Some statement analysis of Chris Watts interview
I decided to delete this analysis from here and repost it on Medium. ...
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 ...
Analyzing Roy Moore’s statements
People sometimes ask me what I think about real-life (i.e., non-game and non-poker) behavior. Generally, I don't weigh in on such things, because most real-world behavior has a lot of ambiguity due to there being so many unknown factors. (For example, is someone nervous because they're deceiving? Or nervous because they're on the spot? Did someone mis-speak because of some sort of subconscious ...
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 Main Event verbal tell of strength
The hand in question occurred when the final table was 7-handed. The behavior is from Scott Blumstein, the eventual winner of the event. To see the hand history, see Hand #101 in this PokerNews article. Long story short: Blumstein had a turned full house and bet the river vs. Pollak. Pollak started talked and smiling and said, "Sick turn" and "What are you on, Scott? Speak!" Blumstein ...
Email from reader about verbal clues in hand
This is an email I got from a reader and thought it was a good example of the kinds of verbal clues of attention/non-focus you can pick up in multi-way pots. Here's the email, with my response to him following: Hello, Here is a funny situation that happened a week ago in a local club where I play once a week. It’s a small stake cash game with a mix of experienced and newbie players and all ...
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 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 ...
Why I don’t wear headphones at the poker table
There's a lot of information at the poker table. Which is why I don't wear headphones. I never want to restrict the possible auditory information I might pick up. A hand I played in Vegas a couple weeks ago illustrates this point very nicely... ...
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 ...
“Disclaimers”: a category for some common verbal statements in poker
There is a class of verbal statements you hear a lot in poker that I call disclaimers. These are statements that attempt to explain away, or “disclaim”, the real meaning behind an action. A basic example of this would be when a no-limit tournament player goes all in while announcing something like, “I’ve only got a few chips left. I guess I’ve got to go all-in.” He is implying that him not having ...
Immediate calls and raises, and talking a lot after betting
On the Pokerstars Big Game (season 1, week 2, ep. 3) there's a hand where Daniel Negreanu has the nut straight on the turn, and the millionaire/amateur poker player Jason Calacanis turns a set and fills up on the river. Calacanis shows some common tells. For one, he's super-talkative with a big hand. Also important are his immediate calls and bets, which give away a lot of info. ...
Three major misconceptions about poker tells
I want to cover some very basic and very practical information on tells. I wanted to talk about three of the most common misconceptions about poker tells. First off, let's start with the much-repeated but not-well-understood adage from Mike Caro that almost everyone knows: Strong means Weak, Weak means Strong. This idea, that people who act strong are holding a weak hand, and people who act ...