This blog post is about a local pro poker player; we’ll call him Maurice, because he’s low-key and he doesn’t want random people knowing much about him. He’s a young guy, in his twenties, who’s one of the best players on our local poker scene. He went from playing small stakes online ($.05-$.10 NLHE and small buy-in SNGs and MTTs) in 2009 to playing $1-2 live after April 2011, to moving ...
Review of poker tells training from Galvin Bay
The following is a review for my poker tells video series sent in by Galvin Bay. Galvin is a professional poker player who currently plays in Macau games. He has also written some poker books (like The Art of Poker) and created poker training videos. Below he gives a review and also some notes on his experience with a couple specific tells. ...
Daily fantasy sports’ connection to poker
Here is a link to an interesting NY Times article titled "How The Daily Fantasy Sports Industry Turns Fans Into Suckers." Amongst other things, it delves into the connection of the fantasy sports world to the poker world: how many of the best fantasy draft players are former poker players; how many of the sites were started by people from the poker world, and how winning fantasy sports bettors ...
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 ...
New Live $1-2 Poker Tells Book
I recently put out a new short ebook that analyzes 35 actual $1-2 NLHE cash game hands, most of which I played myself, but a few are from some $1-2 video footage. The book is called Reading Poker Tells in $1-2 No-Limit Cash Games, and it's available on my site here (in three ebook file formats, including Kindle) and in the Kindle store here. It's only $10 and I think this is a great way to get ...
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 ...
Mark Sherman: The Greatest Poker Player Ever? (guest blog post)
This is a guest post by David Alzofon about a colorful, loud high-stakes poker player, Mark Sherman, who frequented the San Francisco cardrooms in the 1980s. Here's David's bio: David Alzofon grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area where he spent 20 years slogging away in the salt mines of Silicon Valley. During a brief period of unemployment in the mid-'80s, he chanced to come across ...
Hosting a new 2+2 poker tells/behavior forum
Do you know the Two Plus Two poker forum? It's a great place to get poker news and discuss poker hands. I've been a member on there since my first days of playing poker in college in 2000. I still remember reading strategy posts from Greg Raymer years before he ever won the WSOP Main Event. (Yes, I'm old.) Mason Malmuth is the co-owner of 2+2, along with David Sklansky. They've written and ...
New poker tells video series
So the last few months I've been working on a new video series, which I've titled Reading Poker Tells Video. I partnered with Chicago's Windy City Poker Championships, run by Kirk Fallah, so I could use the footage from their cash games and tournaments to make instructional training videos about poker behavior and tells. The last few months I've been watching their footage, analyzing it, and ...
What is Beyond Tells?
Beyond Tells is a poker tells video training series created by Blake Eastman. Earlier this year, I interviewed Blake and wrote an article for PokerNews about BeyondTells. We discussed his background, his interest in poker behavior and behavior in general, and his process of analyzing the poker game footage they collected. I get a lot of people asking for my opinion on the series but I haven't ...
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 ...
My Experience as a Contestant on the TV Show PokerStars’ The Big Game
This is a guest blog post written by Ken Hrankowski, who appeared as the amateur guest player during a few episodes of the TV show Pokerstars’ The Big Game. This post recounts his experience getting onto the show and what it was like playing with big-name players like Phil Hellmuth, Tony G, and Daniel Negreanu. I started playing poker after the “Moneymaker Effect,” as they called it. I found it ...
Talking to John Wood, mental game coach
John Wood recently reached out to me to do a short interview for a site called PokerHeadrush. You can read the interview here. Things we discussed included: the general usefulness of live reads, the importance of the mental game in poker, and the poker scene in Portland. John is a general mental/life coach who also coaches poker players. He's worked with poker players Alex Fitzgerald and Chris ...
Poker Is Dead (brought to you by Legacy Headstones of Ohio)
I get a lot of weird offers from random companies who want to pay me to put up ads or to do "link exchanges" (this is when you put each other's links on your sites, in order to help search engine results). Mostly I get these emails from shady gambling sites who are just trying to ride the coat-tails of more successful sites by getting a link from them. I pretty much ignore all of them. But I ...
Molly’s Game: An Interesting Glimpse Into Private, High-Stakes Poker Games
(Full disclosure: I received a review copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for a review. I was actually planning on reading it and reviewing it anyway, though, so I took them up on the offer.) Molly’s Game is the tale of Molly Bloom and the super high-stakes private poker games she ran for a few years. These games featured celebrities, billionaire businessmen, rich heirs, famous ...
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 pro Davidi Kitai talks about poker tells
In a PokerNews interview of respected Belgian poker pro Davidi Kitai, poker journalist Remko Rinkema conducts a short interview of Kitai on the subject of poker tells. If you're not familiar with him, here is Kitai's Wikipedia page. Here’s a quick synopsis of the few points Kitai makes in the interview: ...
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 ...
What Scientists Have Learned From Studying Poker Players
The following article was written by Dr. Jaclynn Moskow. It's an interesting look at some psychology studies that have involved poker and poker players. It was originally published on Cardplayer.com. Jaclynn has given me permission to post it on my site, which I am honored to do. Jaclynn is a mid to high-stakes cash game specialist who lives in South Florida. She's also adjunct facility at ...
My Bluff magazine poker tells column
Many of you might not know that I've been writing a monthly column for Bluff magazine for the past year and a half. The editor of Bluff, Lance Bradley, approached me in mid-2013 to take over the poker tells/behavior column that Mike Caro had been writing. If you'd like to see some of the articles I've written for Bluff, here's a link. ...
Tommy Angelo writes foreword for Verbal Poker Tells
If you don't know who Tommy Angelo is, you should read his respected book Elements of Poker. If you want a reason to read it, check out these reviews: “Finally I have a legitimate reason to buy an iPad.” – Phil Galfond, about the ebook release of Elements of Poker “Elements of Poker is the best poker book I’ve ever read.” – Jay Rosenkrantz He's also written a book called A Rubber Band Story ...
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 ...
Trip report: Hypnotherapy session with Elliot Roe in Las Vegas
I was in Las Vegas this summer, doing a few poker tells presentations. Jonathan Little, me, and hypnotherapist Elliot Roe were working together doing full-day seminars. (You can read more here about my poker tells part of the presentation.) This blog is about me doing a 1.5-hour hypnotherapy session with Roe. This summer was my first time meeting Elliot, although I’d known him virtually on ...
Scott Seiver’s verbal behavior in One Drop
People have been talking about Scott Seiver's table talk in this year's One Drop tournament. Here's the video: Zach Ralston (a poker player and a producer of a lot of poker footage content) had told me about this hand via email and here was my response (edited a bit): ...