This episode includes part of a poker tells webinar that I, Zach Elwood, did with Terry Wood, owner of PokerRailbird.com. I’m the author of three respected books on poker tells, including Exploiting Poker Tells and Verbal Poker Tells. My first book, Reading Poker Tells, has been translated into eight languages. You can learn more about my poker tells work at readingpokertells.com. Topics discussed: two important categories of poker tells; some specific examples of poker tells (including eye contact tells and how people move their eyes after betting); how tells vary when you go from lower stakes to higher stakes, and more.
Episode links:
- YouTube (includes video)
- Apple Podcasts
- Spotify
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TRANSCRIPT
(A transcript of the intro to this episode…)
Hello and welcome to the People Who Read People podcast with me, Zachary Elwood. This is a podcast about understanding other people and understanding ourselves. You can learn more about it and browse the most popular episodes at behavior-podcast.com.
This podcast initially came about due to me having written some well known books on reading tells in poker, and those books were a result of me playing poker for a living back between 2003 to 2007. My first book, Reading Poker Tells, released in 2012, got many positive reviews from both amateur and professional-level poker players, which led to it selling a lot of copies and it being translated into eight languages. It also led to me writing two follow-up books, Verbal Poker Tells, which is the book I’m most proud of, and Exploiting Poker Tells, which summarized my thoughts at that time on poker tells, non-verbal and verbal, and which I think will be my final book. You can learn more about my poker tells work, and read reviews, at readingpokertells.com.
The success of my poker tells books and video series got me thinking about ways to branch out into more mainstream, non-poker-related areas. From a young age, I’ve always been interested in psychology and behavior — that was the main reason for my initial interest in poker — and so that’s what led to the decision to do a general psychology and behavior podcast. This background might make the title of this podcast make more sense: People Who Read People; it was a play on the song People Who Need People, and it also pointed at my intention to talk to a lot of people who read people in various ways; whether that’s reading tells in poker or in other games, or in other specific domains, or whether it was just understanding people’s psychological motivations.
This episode will be a portion a webinar I did recently with Terry Wood, who’s the creator of the poker education and community website PokerRailbird, that’s pokerrailbird.com. It will be me talking about a few of the most reliable and useful types of tells in poker, and about the art of reading tells in general. If you’re interested in behavior but not a poker player I think you’ll still find this interesting, as some of the tells and dynamics discussed apply to non-poker, real world scenarios. You might just find it interesting to hear about reading behavior in a realm that you’re not familiar with.
In a later episode, I want to talk about how I see reading poker tells as relating to deception detection and situations like interrogations and such. A lot of people mistakenly think that reading poker tells is about detecting lies, but it’s not. In fact, some people might be surprised to find out that I don’t think you can reliably use nonverbal behavior to detect deception; if you’d like more information about that, I recommend listening to a previous episode where I talk with Tim Levine about the difficulty of using nonverbal behavior to detect deception and about what the research tells us on that front. But long story short; reading people well in poker is not about detecting lies but about detecting relaxation and anxiety, or detecting focus or lack of focus in specific situations, things like this. These things give you clues about someone’s state of mind and emotions; which in a game like poker, where players are often in very emotionally polarized states, can be valuable. But that is not what is referred to as deception detection in the behavior arena; it’s just observing people’s states and deducing someone’s likely hand strength in certain situations based on those states. Put another way: a bluff is not the same thing as a lie. And someone leaking signs of relaxation when they’re betting a strong hand also has nothing to do with lying. But I’ll delve more into that in a future episode.
Just a heads up that this episode is on YouTube and includes video so you might enjoy watching it there. If you’re a poker player, Terry said he plans on doing more of these free webinars in the future so if you’re interested in that, you can sign up for his email list on his site PokerRailbird.com.
And if you want the complete talk, which goes into more detail, including about my background and what led me to deciding to write my first book on poker tells, that’s on my site behavior-podcast.com; just look for the entry for this episode there. Also want to apologize about my audio in this; I keep forgetting that the Apple mic I wear sometimes rubs against my shirt, so unfortunately I have some mic noise in there.
Okay here’s the talk with Terry Wood of PokerRailbird.com.