For whom the Tells toll
Try this poker fantasy on for size: You’re playing in the second day of a major WPT or WSOP tournament. The next person eliminated is out of the money; everyone else will receive at least twice his buy-in and have a shot at the final table. You’re on a medium stack in the big blind and glance at your hole cards: a pair of tens. Everyone folds to the small blind, who goes all in! You suspect this player is trying to steal your blind, but he has more chips than you do. If you guess wrong and he has a big hand, you’re probably out of the tournament. If he’s bluffing and you call him, you’ll probably win, double your stack, and have a serious chance at the big money.
What to do? You don’t want to be the “bubble boy” in this situation; if you only knew what he had. You glance over at his hole cards and your head snaps backward in surprise: magically you can actually see through his cards, revealing a nine of hearts and a four of spades. Your newly-discovered X-ray vision has allowed you to catch him on a bluff. You call his all-in raise, and five harmless cards later, you sweep in a monstrous stack of chips. You sense you’re well on your way to poker stardom.
So much for fantasy. Everyone knows we don’t have vision that will enable us to read the underside of a person’s cards. But don’t despair: We do have vision that will allow us to “read” the person holding those cards, and that, in many instances, will allow us to predict the player’s hand as if his or her cards were transparent. We just have to know what to look for at the poker table and correctly decipher what we see.
This is the first in a series of columns that will reveal this critical – or as some have called it – “revolutionary” information; information you can use to become a more successful, winning player at the poker table; information that has heretofore never been available to the pokerplaying community; information I used for 25 years as a career Special Agent with the FBI to uncover the intentions and deceptions of criminals and spies who spent lifetimes trying to mislead and fool their victims.
Enter Annie Duke and Phil Hellmuth
At this point some of you might be wondering “How does a man who spent a quarter-century busting bad guys for the FBI ever get involved with a bunch of poker players in the first place?” Actually, it happened quite by accident. In 2004, the Discovery Channel asked me to participate in a show called More Than Human. The idea of the program was to see if people were superior to machines when it came to detecting whether someone was lying or telling the truth. The television people who developed the storyline selected three individuals whose occupations involved detecting lies: a psychic by the name of Dr. Turi; Annie Duke, a worldchampion poker player; and myself. We were pitted against three machines designed to accomplish the same objective: a polygraph, a voice-stress analyzer, and a pupil dilation apparatus. The challenge was to see who could best tell if an actor was lying or telling the truth, based on twenty-five different verbal statements he made. It turned out that Dr. Turi was less than fifty percent accurate, while Annie and I both detected the correct answer eighteen out of twenty-five times – which, by the way, beat two of the three machines for accuracy.
Here was the interesting part: As we were being tested on our ability to detect deception, I noticed that Annie looked for a lot of the same things I was looking for. She didn’t use the same names I used for what she saw, but her ability to read people was extremely accurate. Naturally, we talked about it over the three days of filming. Annie, by the way, is an extremely delightful, outgoing person – very congenial and full of funny stories. Those who have seen her play poker on television, where she’s all business, would probably be shocked to learn of her gregarious nature.
A few months later, Annie wrote in this magazine that meeting me “was a turning point in [her] No Limit Hold’em Game” and that when I provided her with additional information on my work in nonverbal tells, her “poker game took a jump to the next level.”
As it turned out, Annie Duke was a turning point for me as well; she was the one who turned me on to poker. It was through our conversations that I realized the skills I had used to “read people” and uncover deception with the FBI were also applicable at the poker table. Thanks to Annie, I had a new venue where I could study human behavior and teach poker players how to achieve greater success by recognizing their opponents’ tells while concealing their own at the same time.
Unbeknownst to me, Annie spoke with fellow professional Phil Hellmuth about my ability to read people. Based on her comments, Phil, along with Camp Hellmuth organizer Jeff Goldenberg, decided to include me as a guest speaker at his fantasy camp in Las Vegas.
It was at Camp Hellmuth that I realized t hat the people-reading techniques I routinely used and took for granted in my FBI work were new to the world of poker. Phil told me that he and T. J. Cloutier had taken three pages of notes during my one-hour presentation, adding that, “…we both expressed our amazement that we had taken any notes at all, much less three pages worth, since neither of us had ever taken notes at any previous poker seminars.” Even more satisfying to me: Camp Hellmuth participants reported winning back their seminar costs and much more in just a few short hours of play at the tables, using the tactics I had just revealed earlier that day.
Taking Poker To a New Level
Although the concept of “tells” has been around a long time, what you will be learning in subsequent columns will allow you to observe and decipher a whole new set of heretofore unknown tells, many so subtle and innocuous that it is only through your new knowledge that you will be able to spot them in others, while taking steps to eliminate these tells in your own game. Take for example, the pursing of the lips. What does it mean when your opponent looks at the flop and suddenly purses his lips for the first time during the hand? Lippursing in this circumstance is indicative of disagreement; the player doesn’t like what he sees. The flop is not to his liking: he believes it has not helped his hand and/or has likely strengthened the hand of an opponent. Lip-pursing, then, is an indication that a player believes his hand strength has lessened and he will have lower confidence in what he is holding. Such information can, of course, be of great value to you in determining how to play against him during post-flop action.
Much of the information on nonverbal behavior I will be sharing with you was not even recognized fifteen years ago. It is only through recent advances in brainscan technology and neural imaging that scientists have been able to establish the validity of t he tells I will be describing. Drawing from the latest discoveries in psychology, neurobiology, medicine, sociology, criminology, communication studies, and anthropology – plus my quarter-century of practical experience – I will help you determine if that big raiser across the table truly has the nuts or is bluffing. Along the way, you’ll also discover that the tells I will teach you to identify at t he poker table can also serve you well in all your personal interactions, whether it be dating, dealing with your children, applying for a job, buying a car, or even deciding when to ask your boss for a raise.
How to Become a Serious Threat at the Poker Table
I presume you want to do your best when you sit down at a poker table. No matter what your level, whether amateur or professional, beginner or seasoned veteran, I realize you’re spending your time reading this column to improve your game. I, in turn, want you to walk away knowing you can use what you’ve learned to achieve that objective.
I’m going to treat you just like the FBI special agents I train. It’s a no-nonsense approach. I take my assignments seriously because I know that what I’m teaching can make the difference between life and death in an agent’s work. For you poker enthusiasts, the consequences of not learning and using what I’m presenting will not get you killed, but it can be deleterious to your financial wellbeing. So, let’s see what we can do to keep your bankroll healt hy.
In future columns I will be discussing the importance of tells in playing winning poker and also the right way to be an effective observer at the tables. I’ll also reveal a strategy for minimizing the tells that you transmit and make you a tougher player to read. Finally, I will be highlighting different tells you should watch for whenever you sit down to play, whether it be the Friday night poker game, the casino, or the tournament table.
Finally, based on the success of the 90- minute lecture I give at Camp Hellmuth, I will be conducting an all-day seminar devoted totally to decoding non-verbal behavior at the poker tables. The lectures and “hands on” demonstrations will take place on November 19th in Las Vegas, and I invite all interested Bluff readers to attend. More details on the seminar can be found on my www.navarropoker.com website.
Reading people successfully – learning, decoding, and utilizing nonverbal behavior to predict human actions – is a task well worth your time; one that offers ample rewards for the efforts expended. Effective people-reading skills can improve your quality of life (and your bankroll) whenever and wherever you interact with others. It can make you a winner in that contest we call poker – and life. So plant your feet firmly on the floor, learn and watch for t hose all-important nonverbal behaviors that I’ll be teaching you, and you’ll soon discover “for whom the tells toll” – your opponents. Get ready to “Read ’em and Reap.tm”
