Reviewing Zachary Elwood’s Verbal Poker Tells

I mentioned earlier this week how I’d been reading Zachary Elwood’s Verbal Poker Tells, the follow-up to his earlier Reading Poker Tells. I was able to finish it and wrote a review for Learn.PokerNews, posted today.

I had to mention in my review how the topic Zach chose could seem to be a “niche within a niche within a niche,” although as it turns out the book has a lot of value that goes beyond the narrow scope of verbal tells. I believe anyone reading the book will come away not just with added knowledge about how to decipher opponents’ table talk, but also further equipped to understand many commonly employed approaches to hold’em strategy.

Zach does a nice job in his explanations of all the different kinds of statements about hand strength, misdirections, defensive statements, attempts at manipulation, and other verbal patterns connecting the words players use to the strategies they are employing when playing a hand.

I especially enjoyed the many, many hands discussed in Verbal Poker Tells, including a lot from televised poker that I remembered seeing before. There’s a much greater emphasis on hand histories in this book than was the case with Zach’s earlier one, which makes sense as all of the direct quotes help provide concrete illustrations of the many varieties of tells he’s addressing.

He also does well (as he did in the first book) to distinguish how recreational players tend to exhibit these tells more readily and less subtly than is the case with more seasoned table talkers. And again he makes it clear with several disclaimers that recognizing tells is only a small part of live poker, with an understanding of fundamental strategy more important (and, of course, necessary to have before even being able to think about tells).

I admire Zach for the obvious commitment of time and energy to this new project, and for getting his book completed and now made available for readers. It’s quite an achievement.

Whenever I write a book review I have misgivings about what I wasn’t able to cover in the space of the review. Such is true again with this one, although I’m hoping to interview Zach next week and thus have a chance to add further to the discussion of how Verbal Poker Tells contributes to our understanding of both tells specifically and poker strategy more broadly. Stay tuned over at Learn.PokerNews for that.

Meanwhile, check out the review for more. And enjoy the weekend!

More Stories to Share

Have a busy week coming up here, one which will involve me getting out of the house, to the airport, and down to Florida for a quick trip to the World Poker Tour bestbet Jacksonville Fall Scramble that begins on Thursday. That’s a $3,500 buy-in event with a $500K guarantee that’ll probably bring out a decent-sized crowd.

Today I wanted to direct your attention to a few new items over on the Learn.PokerNews site where we are starting to involve more contributors and have a greater variety of content.

Josh Cahlik has been penning some interesting pieces lately, including “A Beginner’s Guide to Selling Tournament Action” (a good initial primer) and one called “Play and Learn: Exploiting a Tight Image” which details some of what he experienced during his deep run in that Casino Employees Event last summer.

I found myself thinking further about Ryan Riess’s post-WSOP Main Event comment about being “the best player in the world” and decided I had more to say about it after posting some thoughts here last week. In something called “On the Champ Saying He’s ‘the Best Player in the World’,” I talked about how it maybe isn’t such a bad thing for the WSOP ME winner to be emphasizing how skill played a role in his win, especially when considering how the tournament -- and poker in general -- plays to the larger, mainstream audience.

Finally, I most wanted to draw your attention to a piece provided today by Zachary Elwood, author of Reading Poker Tells. He offered some sound “Poker Tell Advice for Beginning Poker Players” that highlights the need to worry more about your own tells (and trying to minimize them) as opposed to searching your opponents for tells.

Elwood, you might know, was called on by Amir Lehavot during his preparations for the November Nine, something Elwood wrote about on his blog last week. As part of that work, he also did a lot of study of other players at the WSOP Main Event final table, and today offered a lengthy breakdown of some of his ideas regarding fourth-place finisher Sylvain Loosli, if you’re curious.

The Learn site has gotten me thinking a lot lately about my own learning of the game, including the sorts of content I loved reading and listening to and watching as my interest and knowledge grew.

For a lot of us those days are long gone, or at least the newness of the game has receded into the past. But the learning obviously has not, and I think that is a big reason why the game continues to interest me. The stories players tell about their experiences remain interesting, too, and always seem to contain something not only new and entertaining, but instructive, too.

That was always the most fun way to learn anything, I think... via stories in which some lesson or idea was conveyed in an pleasurable way.

2013 WSOP, Day 35: Talking Tells

Was a quiet, restful day for your humble scribbler yesterday as I enjoyed what might be a final day off before the last big push through these next couple of weeks helping PokerNews with the coverage of the 2013 World Series of Poker.

As I mentioned yesterday, I did indeed make it a priority to fill the rental’s tank with gas. Actually took a couple of visits to Terrible’s as the lot was too packed with cars on the first try and I did not relish sitting in the heat for even 10 minutes to wait for an open spot. But I did fill the tank, probably for the last time until I head back to the airport in a couple of weeks. And after sleeping late both yesterday and this morning, I feel more or less replenished energy-wise, too.

I did make it to the Rio briefly yesterday, although didn’t look in on any of the poker happening. Following the reports I saw that the $50K played all of the way down to 26 players, meaning the tension is rising considerably there as only the top 16 get paid. Doyle Brunson was among those eliminated on Day 3, and was tweeting a short while ago that he felt he’d only brought his “B” game to the event.

Noticed as well that a woman other than Vanessa Selbst won the first bracelet in an open event in six years as Dana Castaneda won Event No. 54, another of the $1,000 NLHE events.

Several women have made final tables this summer, and while I don’t have current numbers I know that WSOP Communications Director Seth Palansky tweeted a week-and-a-half ago that women made up 4.1% of the entrants through the first 39 events. That would represent an increase in women participating from recent years. For instance, I see in a post I wrote during the summer of 2011 the percentage was about 3.2% through the first 29 events.

I imagine Castaneda’s win won’t hurt that upward trend. Incidentally, there were two women among the 132 who played the $50K Poker Players’ Championship, Jennifer Harman and Vanessa Selbst. Selbst busted Day 1, while Harman got knocked out yesterday along with Tex Dolly.

Like I say, though, while I was at the Rio briefly, it wasn’t to follow any poker. Rather I was there to visit with Reading Poker Tells author Zach Elwood (@apokerplayer on Twitter) over a mid-afternoon lunch. I reviewed his book a while back on Betfair Poker and have mentioned it here from time to time. Like many who have read it, I found it especially insightful and well presented, and am liking hearing other good reviews of it since I wrote mine.

Zach has been in town for a few weeks playing some events and in the cash games while promoting his book. He’s done really well, in my opinion, when it comes to making those who would be most interested in his book aware of it.

Among our topics of conversation was the relative importance of tells in poker, something which I think Elwood addresses well in his book when he points out that “tell-reading is only a small part of playing great live poker.”

I mentioned how when I played that Golden Nugget event a couple of weeks back I couldn’t honestly remember any instances where my decisions were affected by having noticed an opponent’s tell, and that more often I was thinking of others’ betting patterns. He made a great point that when it comes to tells there is a big difference between tourneys and cash games, namely, that in tourneys many players are less likely to reveal them.

He also shared a neat story with me about interacting some with Bill Perkins over recent months, including recently during Perkins’s deep run in the “One Drop High Rollers” event where he finished third.

Zach had analyzed some earlier video of Perkins from High Stakes Poker and the two had gotten in touch afterwards. Edwards has probably improved as a player in several ways over the last couple of years, and while I didn’t get a chance to see any of the tournament last week, I don’t think it is too farfetched to say he might have benefited from Zach’s analysis and advice, perhaps in a hand or three.

After we parted, I joked on Twitter that while I enjoyed our meeting, I didn’t want to say more and give away any “post-meal tells” (an allusion to Zach’s “post-bet tells” category). “I soul read you for IBS” he replied. (I am glad to report his read of my gastrointestinal system was incorrect.)

Will be back over there later this afternoon for Day 1 of the $2,500 2-7 Triple Draw (Event No. 59). Having memories of one of my favorite events I ever covered at the WSOP way back in 2008 when F-Train and I were on this same event. John Phan won it and David Sklansky took sixth, and a couple of months afterward I wrote a post here about the contrasting styles of those two.

As always, head over to PokerNews to follow along.

HBP Home Games Season 2 Continues, Books for Top Three

Them football picks went well yesterday. Was 3-for-3, as I did end up going with the Skins in that toss-up versus Dallas.

A tougher slate of games coming up Sunday, though, with nine of the 12 games currently sporting spreads of three points or less. Then Monday night my poor, pitiful Panthers are playing the equally execrable Eagles in what has to be one of the worst MNF match-ups in recent memory. Not to mention another hard game to pick.

Speaking of looking ahead to Sunday, I wanted to report that Season 2 of the Hard-Boiled Poker Home Games at PokerStars is in full swing, with two more tourneys scheduled for Sunday night. This week will be Event Nos. 13 and 14, a six-handed pot-limit Omaha tournament (at 20:00 ET) followed by a H.O.R.S.E. tourney (at 21:00).

As was the case with Season 1, there will be 20 tourneys altogether this season, with everything wrapping up by the end of December. The top three finishers in the league standings will win books which I will be shipping to them. I have three ready to go for prizes. What I thought I’d do is let the first-place finisher pick one, then the second-place finisher select from the other two, with the third-place finisher getting the remaining one.

One of the books is the great Roll the Bones: The History of Gambling (2006) written by David G. Schwartz who heads the Center for Gaming Research over at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas. It’s a nice hardback copy donated to the cause by our friend and occasional HBP HG player Mike Fasso.

Another is Zach Elwood’s Reading Poker Tells which the author himself donated as a prize. I reviewed Elwood’s book for Betfair Poker a while back, and many others have chimed in on the web and on Twitter regarding how useful the book is for identifying and understanding tells at the table.

Finally, I have a copy of Byron Jacobs’s 2011 strategy book Think Like a Poker Pro to give as a prize. I have to admit that I haven’t read all of it, but what I’ve read seems good and the book did get some praise here and there on the forums, in particular for its limit hold’em advice. It comes with a three-hour video CD, too.

(By the way, if anyone out there would like to donate poker and/or gambling books for me to give as prizes in future seasons of the HBP HG, let me know.)

Anyhow, like I say those finishing in the top three will get to choose which titles they’d like according to their order of finish. Through 12 events, linglemungo is leading the points race with Kevmath second, **GMONEY*722 third, and Season 1 winner thejim2020 currently in fourth.

If you haven’t been playing tourneys in Season 2, there’s still time to collect enough points to move up the leaderboard. See the right-hand column for info about upcoming HBP HG tourneys as well as the club ID/invite code to join my PokerStars Home Game.

Rounders’ Game of Tell & Show

Kind of wiped out today thanks to a late night following some of these marathon SCOOP tourneys on PokerStars. Meaning there ain’t a lot in the tank for posting here at the moment. So let me send you over to another blog for an interesting read.

Not long ago I had the chance to read Zach Elwood’s new book Reading Poker Tells and ended up reviewing it over at Betfair. I enjoyed the book quite a bit, which does a neat job categorizing and describing a number of revealing behaviors at the poker tables. Check out my review for a full run down of what the book covers.

Zach also keeps a blog where he posts further on the subject of tells in poker. Over the last few months he’s posted some interesting analyses of the Pius Heinz-Martin Staszko heads-up battle for the 2011 WSOP Main Event bracelet. Those are some interesting reads, especially for those of us who watched that more-than-six-hour heads-up match play out on ESPN last November.

Anyhow, yesterday Zach published a post discussing tells in Rounders, going beyond the one we all remember -- Teddy KGB and his Oreos -- to point out others exhibited by both Teddy and Mike McDermott. Both characters are pretty transparent, really, with regard to their tells, although as Zach points out in his post the characters’ failings in this regard could well be considered part of the film makers’ intentions to convey certain things to the audience, including the non-poker people watching.

Thanks to my “Poker in American Film and Culture” course, I’ve been watching Rounders over and over again for the last few semesters as one of the films I assign to my class. Thus have I become pretty familiar with the tells Zach is describing in his post, as well as some other idiosyncracies in the presentation of poker scenes that may or may not have been intended.

I’m also picking up on other small things with each viewing, such as the neat symmetry between the backstory about Mike and Worm being involved in fixing a basketball game back at prep school and the later scene in the church gym. As back at prep school, Mike agrees one last time to team up with his friend in a plan to make some scratch, although like before things won’t work out.

Anyhow, check out Zach’s analysis of some tells in Rounders. Kind of thing would be neat to do with a lot of poker films, actually, since there is lot of overlap -- potentially -- between the non-verbal types of communication that happens at the poker tables and the language of cinema.