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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
Jason Lavallee on immediate bets being polarizing
Kristy Arnett interviewed Canadian poker pro Jason Lavallee in 2013 for PokerNews (click here for full audio interview.) In the audio interview, he talked about a queen-high call-down he made in a European Poker Tour event. His opponent's bet-timing played a role in his decision. Basically, he thought that an immediate bet meant that her range was polarized, because most players don't know what to ...
Jonathan Little: Paying attention to opponent behavior
The following is a guest blog post from Jonathan Little. Little is a two-time WPT champion with over $5,000,000 in career earnings. He is the owner of the training site FloatTheTurn.com and is the author of numerous best-selling poker books. You can follow him on twitter @JonathanLittle. Jonathan is running a series of live seminars during the 2014 WSOP with poker tells author Zachary Elwood. ...
Analysis of Sylvain Loosli’s potential poker tells in 2013 WSOP Main Event
In this post, I’m going to describe my analysis of Sylvain Loosli that I did prior to and during the 2013 WSOP Main Event final table. I had been hired by Amir Lehavot to analyze his opponents and himself for possible behavioral leaks. The point of this post is not just to talk about how I went about trying to find patterns in Loosli and what those patterns may have been, it’s also to talk about ...
Analyzing poker tells for Amir Lehavot at the 2013 WSOP Main Event
A couple weeks before the WSOP Main Event final table, I got an email from Amir Lehavot (founder of PokerWit.com and 3rd in this year's WSOP ME), asking if I’d be interested in helping him prepare for the final table. After discussing what I might be able to do to help him, and making sure we had similar expectations, I agreed. My role was to analyze existing footage of his opponents for possible ...
Reading Poker Tells book mentioned in 2013 WSOP
This year, during the World Series of Poker Main Event broadcast, my book Reading Poker Tells got a shout-out from Norman Chad. Here's the clip; go to the 1hr1m point if it doesn't automatically take you there. I'd sent a copy of Reading Poker Tells to Norman a few months ago, but I've sent out so many books over the past year to people (roughly $4,000 worth!) and haven't heard back from ...
Why I don’t wear headphones at the poker table
There's a lot of information at the poker table. Which is why I don't wear headphones. I never want to restrict the possible auditory information I might pick up. A hand I played in Vegas a couple weeks ago illustrates this point very nicely... ...
$500 Pendleton tournament – Immediate check-behind from aggressor raises red flags
This past weekend I played in several tournaments at Wild Horse Casino in Pendleton, Oregon. I played a $200, a $300, and a $500 buy-in. I had some pretty bad luck, but I also did some stupid stuff that probably contributed to my lousy showing. For one thing, I had scheduled a 30-minute phone interview right in the middle of the $200 tournament, which caused me to be blinded and anted down from ...
Got third in a fairly big tournament: thoughts on poker tells
This past weekend I played a $215 tourney at Chinook Winds, put on by Deepstacks Poker. Out of about 280 players, I got third for $5,700. I feel like I’m playing my best tournament game I’ve ever played; I can literally only point to one hand of the entire 22 hours of playing where I believed I’d made a mistake. That’s a big step up for me; in most of the few bigger buy-in tourneys I’ve played ...
One Drop Tournament: Guy Laliberte’s poker tells
I spent the last couple days studying footage of Guy Laliberte playing poker. I started out studying the One Drop $1 million buy-in tournament final table footage, with the goal of picking up significant patterns Guy might have in significant hands. There were quite a few hands where Guy had strong hands and obviously wanted action. The problem was that there was really only one significant bluff ...
Chris Moneymaker getting a live read on Chris Oliver
I've been too busy to do many interesting blog posts lately, but I plan on doing some more in-depth televised poker analysis soon, on the level of what I did with the Pius Heinz WSOP 2011 footage. For now, I'll just post this video where it seems that Chris Moneymaker has a really good live read on his opponent Chris Oliver. This isn't just an interpretation; Moneymaker actually tells his "mental ...
Loose hand movements associated with high hand strength
I wanted to add another note about Martin Staszko and his tells at the 2011 WSOP ME. One of the biggest hands he got was when he had A9 and got a full house on the turn (click for video link to start of hand). As I stated in the last post, I think he had a lot of physical looseness in this situation, and I think this was due to having such strong cards. I think the looseness/relaxation of his hand ...
2011 WSOP: Martin Staszko’s (Possible) Poker Tells
I’ve been reviewing the 2011 WSOP Final Table footage of Staszko and Heinz, trying to pick up some patterns in Staszko’s body language. I haven’t been too successful. The main thing that got in the way of analyzing his body language patterns was that Staszko just didn’t bluff very much. In order to analyze someone’s tells you need to see how they act when they’re putting out a significant bluff ...
Watching the players directly to your left
I played in a $180 buy-in tournament the other day. I got knocked out in 18th out of 85 or so (JJ against AQ and AK all-in pre-flop). I think my observational skills play a big role in me consistently doing well in tournaments (although honestly I haven't played in many decent buy-in ones). I spot a lot of body language stuff when the stacks get low in proportion to the blinds, when people are in ...
Another example of Pius Heinz avoiding eye contact with a big hand
(Apologies: apparently the YouTube video I was linking to for this post has been removed. I will work on trying to find another video and edit this post.) I was reviewing some WSOP footage and saw another very good example of Pius Heinz avoiding eye contact when he hits a big hand. This was the tell I talked about in my last WSOP-related post. This is pre-November-9, when they were nearing the ...
Poker tells at 2011 WSOP Final Table: Pius Heinz’ eye-contact tell
(Apologies; it looks like the YouTube video I linked to for this post and the following post has been removed. I will try to remedy this in the future.) This post is about the most significant poker tell that I saw at the Final Table of the 2011 WSOP NLHE Main Event. It involves Pius Heinz and the amount of eye contact he would make with his opponent in different situations. In a nutshell, Heinz' ...
Situations where poker tells are most important
I noticed a few poker tells I thought were significant in the 2011 WSOP Main Event final table, and I’ll be talking about them for the next couple blog posts. But for the most part, the tells were very few and far between. There were only a handful of moments in the play between the final four players (Heinz, Lamb, Staszko, and Giannetti) where I thought someone’s body language was giving away ...
2011 WSOP ME final table = great poker television
This year’s World Series of Poker Main Event final table was just great poker television. I haven’t been interested in watching televised tournaments for a long time, just because it’s usually so boring. I hate watching tournaments that have been edited, because you don’t get the game flow and they usually choose the most boring all-in situations to show. I also hate seeing the hole cards in ...
Most ridiculous poker hand ever televised
You will enjoy this if you haven't seen it already. It's from a Spanish televised poker tournament where one guy accidentally flips his cards up and plays heads-up against a player who flops a set. See if you can count the number of pure fundamental mistakes made by both these players. It is poker comedy at its best. No, the games aren't dead and will never be dead. ...