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 ...
Poker tells book translations
My first book, Reading Poker Tells, has been translated into five languages, and a sixth is coming. I thought I'd make a page with all the translations visible: www.readingpokertells.com/translations. A couple of these, French and Italian, are available for free. My second book, Verbal Poker Tells, would be a difficult translation, because it has so many verbatim transcriptions of ...
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 ...
The state of the Portland area poker scene
I often get acquaintances who visit Portland and ask me for recommendations of where to play poker in Portland, so I thought I'd write a short post about what poker games are running in the Portland area, and give an update on the new "players are required to deal" rules. If anyone spots any wrong info in this or wants to give me some info to add, use the Contact form to let me know; thanks! On ...
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, ...
Donating 50% of site sales to charity
Update: this has ended and results are at bottom of post. Starting tomorrow, September 26th, and going to October 31st, 2017, I'll be donating 50% of the revenue from all of the poker tells ebooks sold on this site or sold at readingpokertells.video to the charity Americares. After a little bit of research, it seems like Americares is a respected charity, and they are apparently doing a lot of ...
Live poker strategy recommendation
If you've followed my blog for a while or been on my email list for a while, you know that I rarely promote anyone else's poker content. But this is a poker book I thought would be useful for live poker players who are trying to improve, so here it is: James "SplitSuit" Sweeney is a professional poker coach and the co-creator of Red Chip Poker. His first book, Dynamic Full Ring Poker, is widely ...
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 ...
The Sopranos: all the poker scenes
Here's a video compilation I made showing all the poker scenes from The Sopranos: ...
2017 WSOP $10K PLO winner talks about opponent behavior/tells
Tommy Le, winner of the 2017 WSOP $10,000 Pot-Limit Omaha event, talked about his opponent's behavior in a pivotal hand where he had a set of Kings and folded to a raise on the flop. I transcribed this hand from www.PokerGo.com, where you can subscribe month-to-month to watch poker events and footage, including WSOP events. Also thanks to poker player Skip Parker for sending me an email drawing my ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
Free poker tells email courses
I've made quite a few free email courses on poker tells/behavior over the last few years. I figured it'd be nice if you could see them all in one place. Video Series email course This 3-part course includes a free 15-minute video on "defensive chip handling" from my Reading Poker Tells Video Series, and a couple other subjects. This is a good one to watch if you're curious about my video series ...
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. ...
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. ...
Analysis of Will Kassouf’s “speech play” in 2016 WSOP Main Event
If you’ve been watching the World Series of Poker Main Event episodes this year (2016), you probably know who Will Kassouf is. He’s a talkative player who got a lot of coverage due to his constant chatter in hands. Not since Jamie Gold has a WSOP inspired such attention, and created such controversy, for his during-hand yapping. I've got a few pieces of content analyzing Kassouf's patterns and I'm ...
Will pay for strong hand histories featuring poker tells
So I'm currently working on my new poker tells book. It will be the third and final part of the trilogy that started with Reading Poker Tells and Verbal Poker Tells (and I'm also quite confident it will be the last book I write.) It will be called something like Reading Poker Tells: Practical Applications. Here's the pre-order page for it; it talks about the reasons why I wanted to write the book ...
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 ...
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 ...
Verbal poker tell at EPT High-roller event
A couple days ago, in the EPT 10K high-roller poker tournament, the following hand occurred: 10pm: Holz hero calls all-in, busts Level 26 - Blinds 30,000/60,000 (5,000 ante) Fedor Holz's extraordinary day is now over, with the young German making a pretty audacious call for his tournament life...and losing. Holz got things started with a limp from the cutoff (also under the gun) and both ...
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 ...