This is just to mention that I started a Substack blog that I'll be occasionally adding to. If you're interested, please read the details about it here. ...
Steve Zolotow’s favorite poker hand, which includes some tells
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 ...
Interviews about poker tells
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: ...
Pro poker player Brandon Sheils discusses his poker tells research project
On a recent People Who Read People podcast episode, I interviewed Brandon Sheils, a pro poker player who recently did a study on poker tells as part of his getting a Masters in Psychology. Brandon is a pro poker player and coach. You can see Brandon's poker-focused YouTube channel here and his Twitter @brandonsheils here. I was interested to interview Brandon because I had helped him out a bit ...
Podcast episodes about nonverbal and verbal behavior in sports and games
This is a compilation of all the episodes of my People Who Read People podcast that are related to understanding psychology and behavior in games and sports. Game/sports-related episodes: Poker tells: A talk with Brian Koppelman, writer of Rounders, Billions, and more: We talk about how he got into poker, his interest in deciphering human behavior and finding clues, poker tells in ...
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 ...
Next Generation Poker app makers find surprising result for best Omaha hand
I talked to Andrew Emory the other day. Emory is the creator of Next Generation Poker, an application for tracking live poker sessions (how much won and lost and similar info) and hand analysis (inputting hands played and learning about hand equity and range equity). It's available for iOS and coming soon for Android. A few interesting things about this: Best hand in Omaha? They ran ...
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 ...
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 #3
In June of 2019, I ran an essay contest. I'll be posting the four winners of these on the blog. Here's the third one. This is from Karl Zipple. How Zachary Elwood's books and videos have improved my poker game by Karl Zipple “All in.” Not exactly what you want to hear after turning your ace high into a bluff on the river. Damn it, Karl. Why didn’t you just check? So stupid! Everyone ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
Some interesting behavior in the 2018 $1M-buy-in One Drop
I recently appeared on Steve Barton's Heads-up Poker Podcast, talking about tells in a 2018 Big One for One Drop hand. The hand was submitted by a listener to that podcast, and I was glad they submitted it because I haven't been watching much WSOP coverage this summer and I might have missed it otherwise. The hand features a pre-flop shove from millionaire Rick Salomon (also known as the guy ...
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. ...
Press Release: “Reading Blockchain Tells” new source for cryptocurrency news
Update 4/7/18: Due to lack of website traffic, Reading Blockchain Tells has been shut down. Thanks to everyone who showed their support. It was a fun week-long ride while it lasted. Press release 4/1/18: Based on the advice of my marketing consultant and best friend Steve Schultz, I’m announcing that I’m entering the cryptocurrency industry, effective immediately. From here on out you’ll ...
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 ...