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 ...
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) ...
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. ...