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Research shows us that nonverbal behavior isn’t useful for deception detection. People will sometimes take this to mean that poker tells don’t exist. For my podcast, I’ve talked to many people highly skeptical of using nonverbal behavior in real-world, high-stakes situations (as they are right to be) but who also apply that well-founded skepticism to making use of nonverbal behavior in other domains that I see as very different (like poker and other games).
Long story short for why this point doesn’t apply to poker tells, and reading behavior in games in general: poker tells have nothing to do with deception detection. Poker tells exist due to several factors: for example, there can be fluctuations over time in indicators of emotions and feelings (e.g., a player being highly relaxed and unrestrained in one spot but highly restrained and stoic in another); there are also indicators of mental focus or lack of focus, and other things. No poker tell I’ve ever written about has anything to do with detecting deception. (One area where game and non-game domains do map over, though, is that it’s very hard to get a reliable read that someone is bluffing: this maps over to it being very hard to tell if someone is lying. Most actionable tells associated with big bets will be tells of someone just being so relaxed and carefree from having a big hand; that has barely any analogy in real-world, non-game domains. Whether someone is innocent or guilty in an interrogation setting, they probably will not have any analogous feelings to someone betting a strong hand in poker.)
I’m actually working on a book at the moment (Sept 2026) that will go over the differences between reading behavior in game versus non-game (real world) environments. I think that’s an under-examined topic and an important one to anyone interested in understanding practical applications of reading behavior. Below, I’ll give a few observations on these differences, and link to a podcast episode where I discuss these ideas.
- Small behavioral edges are more actionable in games. In games with hidden information, you often will be in spots where decisions can easily go one of several different ways: this means that even a highly imperfect behavioral clue can be practically useful. In real-world, high-stakes situations, there is almost always a lot of actual information available on which to base decisions. (Sometimes there is not, but even in those cases, there are actual words/language to study, which are much more meaningful than nonverbal behavior.) And, most importantly: in those real-world situations, there are many more risks and potential harms if one were to base important decisions on highly ambiguous, highly variable clues of whatever sort.
- Games constrain the possibilities. Poker has fixed rules, discrete turns, and a relatively limited number of player states; all this creates a much more clean behavioral problem than an interrogation or interview, which involves open-ended conversation and few rules, which leads to a much more “noisy” environment.
- Games can involve polarized incentives and emotions. A bluffer may be highly anxious while a player with a monster hand may be very relaxed or happy, and players often actively try to project the opposite of their true state. Those clean contrasts have little analogy to real-world settings (e.g., a player feeling on top of the world with a strong hand has little analogy to anyone in an interrogation setting).
- Games can involve multiple sessions/rounds. This point, coupled with the fact that those different spots will involve fluctuations in motivations and emotions, make it easier to make comparisons and look for patterns.
Here’s a podcast episode where I spent a good amount of time talking about the differences between making use of behavior in game versus non-game situations:
You might also enjoy this look at what generalist “behavior experts” often get wrong about poker and poker tells.
Zachary Elwood is the author of the Reading Poker Tells trilogy of books, which has been translated into eight languages and sold more than 48,000 copies. See more frequently asked poker tells questions.