The following is reposted from a 2015 piece I wrote for Bluff magazine. It was originally located at this URL but has become unavailable due to Bluff going out of business. I saw this study mentioned recently in Maria Konnikova's book 'The Biggest Bluff' and was reminded about this piece and noticed it was offline, so I wanted to share it again. A few notes on this piece: The original title ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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. ...
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 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 ...
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 ...
Poker trip to Los Angeles, observing verbal behavior
I spent a week in L.A. at the end of February, playing poker and appearing in a couple episodes of the live-streaming poker show Live at the Bike. I played primarily $5-5 and $5-10 NLHE cash games. I haven’t played much at all in the last few years, so it was an interesting and educational trip, getting back into playing all the time and seeing how people were playing at these stakes. I’d also ...
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 ...
Poker tells at live $1-2 no-limit
Update: Did you know I have a poker tells video series? Check it out here. In the past couple of weeks (November 2012), I played a few sessions of live $1-2 NLHE with the purpose of studying what poker tell information was the most important and relevant. It’d been a while since I played $1-2 (haven't been playing much at all lately with the exception of some $2-5 and the occasional $100+ ...
Guy Laliberte’s poker tells, Part 3: bet timing and leaning back in the chair
This is the third post in a series about Guy Laliberte's poker tells. This one will include a short analysis of Laliberte's bet timing tells. It's admittedly a small sample size, but what stands out is that when Laliberte chooses to bluff in a significant spot, it seems he is more likely to bet or raise quickly, within a few seconds. When he has a big hand, he is more likely to take a long time. ...
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 ...
Phil Ivey talks about poker tells
Phil Ivey recently sat for an interview (which is a rare thing) conducted by Nolan Dalla. Although it was just a few soft-ball questions (no mention of Full Tilt Poker stuff), it still gives a very interesting glimpse into Ivey's mind, in my opinion. He also talks a little bit about poker tells. ...
I’m interviewed on Badugi Allstars poker podcast
The boys at Badugi Allstars interviewed me on their poker podcast. Talk included: Why I wrote the book What makes my book different from other poker tells books The importance of correlating tells with specific situations Some discussion on the common tell of defensive chip handling Dissing Joe Navarro and Mike Caro (respectfully) Penis-shaped doughnuts (it's a Portland, Oregon ...
More poker tells in Rounders (besides KGB’s Oreo)
Hi, I'm Zach Elwood, the author of the book Verbal Poker Tells (amongst other poker tells projects). This is my blog. My email acquaintance Michael Blinder recently wrote to point out something very awesome in the movie Rounders. Both Teddy KGB and Mike McDermott (Matt Damon’s character) exhibit a few poker tells besides the infamous Oreo cookie one. Both of them exhibit a kind of poker tell I ...
Trying to influence villain to call or fold (false tells)
A guy emailed me about a hand where he tried to give a false poker tell of strength (showing his neighbor his cards) to get a guy to fold to his all-in flop bet. He described himself as playing in a high-stakes home game. His email led to a discussion about how smart it is to try to influence your opponents in such a way. ...
Genuinely angry call means weakness
This post and the next few posts will be an assortment of behavioral poker tells that helped me in my last $15-30 limit session. I wanted to share them and also write about them in the interest of helping me use them better in a session. Sometimes I get good tells but I don’t fully know the best strategy to make the best use of them. ...
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 ...
Difficulty of categorizing and remembering tells
I think the key to mastering behavioral poker tells is knowing how to efficiently look for and interpret player behavior. What behavior for a player is giving you the most information? What behavior does the player exhibit the most frequently? What behavior is easiest to spot? The answers to all of these questions can be hard to figure out, and some behaviors will be very reliable but hard to ...
Some tells in a $5-10 no-limit game
I went to Spirit Mountain Casino (in Grand Ronde, Oregon) this past weekend to study the difference between no-limit tells across a range of three different stakes: $1-3, $2-5, and $5-10. I wanted to do this because I'd been working on some chapters for the book related to how tells differ across stakes and between limit and no-limit. I'll tell you a few interesting observations I made on the ...