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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...