the psychology behind bluffing/reading faces

[jackblackwild]

I recently came across a really cool clip about an ex cia agent named Joe Navarro. He apparently has used all his training from spy hunting and applied it towards poker, which is really interesting to see done. Navarro goes into how you can read people beyond the obvious twitches and he also gets into how you can make it hard for others to read your game. The whole psychological aspect of poker is really displayed. I don't know really where you can find more about him, but I know he is on youtube.

-Cheers guys

[Piemaster]

He has recently written a book with Phil Hellmuth called Read 'Em and Reap.

No idea if it's any good or not.

[Bugsbunny]

[FindingNemo]

[nsidestrate]

As a minor quibble, he is an ex-FBI agent, not CIA. He also does a number of seminars in Vegas. Reviews are somewhat mixed.

I have been reading the books by Paul Ekman recently to great effect. He does some very dry scholarly material about how to read facial expressions and assess the emotional state of people based on those facial expressions. He believes that facial expressions associated with emotiion are universal and virtually impossible to suppress. Even when people try very hard to mask their emotions, they tend to appear very quickly in fleeting "micro-expressions" before the person composes their face back into the mask they hope to portray. I have found these books to be extremely helpful to me in poker situations (and in wife understanding situations). Although these books are not intended for poker players specifically, I found them much more useful for poker to me than the Navarro book, although I think the Navarro book has value too.

In poker, the micro-expressions of concern and happiness are often 100% certain tells for me. In wife-management the difference between real and faux anger has saved my skin a number of times.

[poker_Elmo]

[nsidestrate]

[jeffnc]

I recently attended a seminar at our child's daycare, which talked about emotional development and the brain. They discussed some of the same stuff as Navarro's book. i.e. the connection between the limbic system and the thinking brain. Little children are great because there's very little filtering from the limbic system. It just comes out. As Navarro points out, the initial reaction is hardwired into us but as adults the filtering system becomes more sophisticated and the "don't reveal" pose Navarro recommends, along with sunglasses etc., can keep things from getting through.

I really liked Navarro's book, more than Caro's, but ultimately I see very few of these tells in real life. I don't think I'm unobservant, even though I still need to work on it. I just think most players with any experience don't show as many tells as some believe. I think it's probably because
a) some players have experience hiding tells
b) some players don't know that they're bluffing, etc because they're too inexperienced to know the relative strength of their hand or draw
c) some players are simply not that excited by the stakes they're playing so they don't exhibit emotional highs or lows

Just ordered Emotions Revealed.

[nsidestrate]

[jeffnc]

Don't get me wrong, I see tells, it's just that they're not as reliable as the impression you sometimes get.

You see "happy feet". Sometimes it's because they see the cocktail waitress coming up behind me. Or their favorite team just scored on the TV. You see a confidence tell, but they did it on purpose to throw you off. You play with the same group of guys, and a tell that seemed to be valid last month now means something else. Sometimes there will be a reliable tell, but that tell means either very strong or very weak, not medicore, so it's hard to know what to do. (e.g. one player in our game will occasionally make a casual chip toss for a large bet, and he will do the exact same thing with a flopped set and a flush draw. If the flush draw comes (or doesn't), what to do?)

I pick up more from betting patterns. But I'm still assuming there's more to learn from tells....

[Taardvark]

[Fast Eddy]

I find tells most useful in NL facing large bets and tournaments. Beginners and/or poor players are sometimes rife with them.

If you can get an opponent who's just pushed all-in talking, it can be very helpful. I think there's almost always a story to be told by the demeanor of someone who's just made a huge bluff and/or hit a monster hand.