The Poker Corner

During their World Series broadcasts ESPN usually breaks up the episode with a little featurette they call “The Nuts”. They show some amusing poker-related trivia (poker fashion! chip tricks!) or they have big-name players involved in some manner of hijinks. Last year we saw Chris Ferguson using playing cards to slice bananas, carrots, pickles, and just about everything else he had in the crisper. This year we saw the dramatic World Roshambo Championships, which next year will probably be a $5,000 buy-in event.

There was an episode of “The Nuts” shown during the last Limit Hold-Em event that featured poker professional Andy Bloch. In the preface of the piece Bloch says that poker players are better than anyone else at detecting when people are lying, since they’re around people doing just that all day long. And so ESPN put Bloch to the test—they’d hook someone up to a lie detector (reportedly over 95% accurate), ask them questions, and see if Bloch could beat a collection of wires, electrodes and suspicious software.

Now, I have all the respect in the world for Andy Bloch. As stated on ESPN, Bloch has 2 degrees from MIT and graduated from Harvard Law School. He's made the final table of two WPT events and he's a jersey-wearing member of the Full Tilt Poker juggernaut. What he says is worth your careful and close attention.

But the experiment as presented is silly. The test subject is Penn Gillette, the illusionist, actor, showman, con man, and co-author of the new book How to Cheat Your Friends at Poker. This is a guy who's made his living at deception, misdirection, and flat-out lyin'. Seemingly a perfect challenge for Bloch. But the questions aren't simple or open-ended. Questions like "Are you a descendent of Captain Cook" and "Did you act in the movie Wall Street" provide far more background information than those you'd encounter at a poker table (or in life itself). It would've been far more interesting to have Gillette answer simple questions (i.e., What is your favorite color? Do you like dogs?) and see how Bloch did.

In the end the machine beat Andy, but not by much—in fact, it was close enough that I wondered how the hell Gillette was spoofing the polygraph. The idea that poker players are the best in the world at detecting lies has been put forward before, for one by Phil Hellmuth during last year's World Series coverage. He didn't fare too well when Norman Chad read random biographical statements and Hellmuth had to decide which were true and which were false.

The reason may be that the poker table isn't an exact reproduction of the real world. In poker, lying is a fundamental part of the game. Of course, lying is a fundamental part of life, too—tomorrow, keep a running list of how many lies you tell during the day. When someone chirpy asks, "How are you today?!" and you grunt, "Great,", you're telling a lie. Unless you are great. Which no one ever is.

But when you're playing poker, deception possibly lies behind every action. Your job, in fact, is to skillfully disguise your intentions while sussing out what your opponent is up to. One way to do this is by detecting "tells", actions your opponent makes that unconsciously give away information. There are as many tells as there are stars in the sky, but a good place to start for information is Mike Caro's Book of Poker Tells, which delivers what it advertises. You'll find descriptions (and some hilarious photographs) of various tells and giveaways to look for.

One lesson you should immediately add to your poker toolbox is this chestnut: Strong means weak, weak means strong. Players running a bluff will often try to act as though they haven't a care in the world. They'll slam a stack of chips in the middle of the pot, glare back as you give them the once-over, snort impatiently as you think things over. Conversely, players who actually hold the nuts will sigh theatrically before making a move, they'll push in chips as though they were sending their children out into the cold, they'll frown and grimace and say things like, "Gee, I hope that was a smart move…"

This may all seem a bit hard to believe. Are people really that bad at acting? The answer is, yes—if you watch television or movies, you know full well that even professional actors are that bad at acting. Sometimes people don't realize that they're overacting—they want you to think they're weak, and so they send out such an overwhelming signal that their play stinks like a guy wearing way too much aftershave.

But there are other ways players give away their hands. Players who hit the flop often stare at it long and hard, as if making sure their eyes aren't deceiving them—and then their eyes flash down to their chips, which they intend to stick into the pot. Some players change the size of their bets depending on their hands—overbetting when they're bluffing and don't want a call, underbetting when they want to milk you. Some players hate parting with their highest-denominated chips, so when they aren't sure of their hand they'll toss in a bunch of little chips, saving their greens and blacks for hands when they know they'll be returning to home sweet home. Some tells take some practice to put into practice—Daniel Negreanu says on ESPN that he looks at an opponent's neck, to see if his carotid artery is thumping. Annie Duke says she looks to see if a player's blink rate increases.

Some of these techniques may be a bit advance for your local low-limit game. But when you're not involved in a hand you should be examining the other people at the table, developing an idea of how they play. You don't necessarily have to pick up something as specific as "his left pinky twitches when he's bluffing", but you should have an idea if a player is tight or aggressive, if he likes to bluff, if he's willing to call without a hand. Once you have that sort of read, you can take it a bit further, adding bits and pieces to the puzzle, learning how the players behaves when he's bluffing, when he's not sure if he's beat, when he holds a monster. You won't learn how to read another players' mind in one sitting—it takes time, and it takes work.

The most important player you need to examine for tells is yourself. Think about hands you've played in the past, hands where you bluffed, hands where you held the nuts. Think about how you played them. What you said as you played them. Where your eyes rested, how you bet. Your goal should be consistency of action regardless of the situation. Make things as hard as possible for your opponents. Lose the amateur dramatics.

Picking up tells is a skill you can practice away from the poker table. Walk around the office and try to guess the mood of people before you speak to them. Learning at a glance when your significant other is a ticking time bomb can save you a world of sorrow. Interpreting body language, voice inflections, and what people are saying between the lines is a life skill worth developing. A skill that great poker players have honed to a razor's edge. Maybe I don't think Andy Bloch can outdeduce a polygraph machine, but I sure as hell wouldn't want to have him staring me down with a mountain of chips in the middle and seven-deuce in my hand.