Phil Hellmuth Presents Read 'em And Reap: A Career FBI Agent's Guide to Decoding Poker Tells [Paperback]

This book is very good. It does a very good job of laying the groundwork for the psychology and physiology behind tells. It explains the body's natural tendency to react to various situations as a function of the biology of the brain and thousands of years of evolution. It also takes the reader through several learning excercises that will help increase awareness of important things to observe and additionally help the reader to be less "readable" himself. Additionally, it is well organized and well written.

I have read and re-read every tell book on the market and dozens of poker books. I find it interesting that so many "experts" can not agree on the value of tells. In John Feeney's "Inside the Poker Mind" he minimizes the value of tells quite a bit. In the tells section of "Super System 2" Mike Caro suggests that you "might easily double your income" by developing your skills. In this book the authors suggest that winning poker is 70% reading players and only 30% reading the cards("understanding the mathematical and technical aspects") They do tell you that their 70/30 equation is geared towards larger buy-in no limit tournaments but the overall presentation suggests that this 70/30 is a general guide to poker.

Personally, I think they may all be somewhat correct! Let me explain. Feeney plays(played) mostly middle and upper limit holdem and stud where the players are more advanced and rely on their technical prowess and aggression to hold an edge. In the lower limit games there are so many available tells that Caro might not be far off in his assertion. Navarro and Hellmuth address primarily no limit holdem tournaments as far as the specific examples from Hellmuth's poker career. Why is this important? Because elimination no limit events may put the most pressure on the other players and the time allotted to making decisions is significantly longer than in limit cash games. So a player of Hellmuth's caliber, given extended time to study opponents may in fact have an enormous edge in reading players-approaching his theoretical 70% number. And this is why I rate the book a 4 instead of a 5; the average player or players playing mostly limit cash games versus no limit tournaments will not be operating under the same set of circumstances as Hellmuth does in his mostly no limit tournament environment. And taken out of context* the value of tells is highly debateable. I feel they under emphasize this critical explanation in their book and may have oversold the value of tells for many lesser experienced players. Don't misunderstand-the book is very good but you need to be a fundamentally good poker player to extract additional profit from developing tells skills and using your skills to exploit your opponents. By all means buy the book but keep things in perspective.

*This is not the same "context" the other reviewer is speaking of. He is speaking of the context of the tell itself where I am referring to the value of tells as they relate to the specific poker environment or situation(ie cash or no limit tournament)

Post Script Nov 16, 2007: I have just finished re-reading this book for the third time and if the edit portion would allow it I would change my rating to a five. After reading it again I not only overlooked some great information on my first two readings but after reading it I watched a couple of episodes of High Stakes Poker and spotted numerous tells from big name pros that I had not even been aware of enough to look for; I spotted tells from Sammy Farha, Paul Wasicka and Patrick Antonius to name just a few. Wow. A casual reading did not give me that awareness but studying the book did. There is definitely a lot to learn if you will put in some time. This book is a must have if you take your game seriously at all. If you can spot tells in seasoned professionals I am confident you can find lots of tells in your regular games.

I just finished a first pass through _Read 'Em and Reap_. I'm sure I could write a better review after a few sessions of live play trying to use what I have learned, but I can always edit this one in the light of any significant results[1].

Too many books of this general type are fluffed up with a lot of rhetoric about why we should care about the subject; there's only a little of that here, before the author dives right in. Navarro provides a good catalog of unconscious tells to look for, hints on how to distinguish those from acting, and a good method for sealing yourself off from broadcasting tells (hint: watch Hoyt Corkins play). I was pleased to see that he discusses how to put tells in context and doesn't exaggerate their importance.

There isn't going to be a magic bullet in this field, as people vary in their responses, not to mention acting ability and the curious phenomenon of unconscious acting. I was once in a hand with two players ahead of me, where I had picked up a pair of 9s with my 97 (No snide comments allowed: The Persian Carpet Ride is my favorite trash hand, and you have one, too.) The two other players were competing to see who could lean over the pot the furthest; I had not seen anyone at the table completely lose it like this before or since. Caro would say they were weak but acting strong; Navarro would say they were strong unless you could be sure they were acting. With a bet and a call ahead of me, I'd love to be able to say I correctly diagnosed what they were doing, which was trying to make something happen with a couple of mediocre overcard hands, and raised them back into their chairs. I didn't, though; since I couldn't decide which way they were leaning, so to speak, I got out of the way with my middling pair. I wouldn't do that today.

I'm thinking that Navarro is absolutely right that spotting a subtle initial reaction is much better than trying to figure out what something dramatic like that really means.

Navarro carefully points out that stress-based tells are not going to be prominent in low-stakes games. I'm glad of that warning, as my current live game is fairly inexpensive and populated mostly by people who have reasonable poker faces. This means I face a real challenge in tell-spotting.

The book is lightly sprinkled with Phil Hellmuth's anecdotes, but don't let that keep you from buying it. A couple of them are new, relevant, and actually pretty funny.

I'm absolutely disgusted to see this book at #146 in sales; that means I have to completely memorize the material on minimizing my own tells, as I cannot assume that most people have not read this book. I got in on the poker boom late, and now this. Darn!

1. Ha! I now have major tells on two of the regulars in my local game, and that doesn't count the others who are always going to fold or always going to call a big bet, so I know what and how to play against them even if they were invisible. So Navarro has helped; now if he just had a cure for the one guy who gets lucky every time no matter how badly he's beat when the money goes in ...

This book is pretty bad. It has a few useful tidbits of info if you are willing to wade through pages and pages of filler material. I strongly suggest anyone considering purchase go to a bookstore and examine the book first. Here are some things you will find:

1. Look at the print - it's practically double-spaced.

2. It's filled with unnecessary full-page photos. For example, look at page 168, where a full-page photo shows what whistling looks like.

3. It reuses photos. Look at pages 34 and 87. Notice anything? Entire page taken up with exactly the same photos. The captions are slightly different, but basically say the same thing.

4. It reuses content. Everything is repeated over and over and over again. There are countless examples of this throughout the book.

5. The writing is very long-winded. Open to any random page and read a few lines and you'll see what I mean. Here's an example: pages 133 to 137 describe a single tell called a tongue-jut, including a full-page photo to show what it looks like. Here's what those 5 pages say: if a player flicks his tongue between his teeth for a second, he feels like he got away with something. That's it. 5 pages.

6. The Phil Hellmuth anecdotes are self-promoting, uninteresting and basically useless to the reader. Is anyone surprised by this? To see what I mean, flip through the book and read any section with a gray background. For example, on page 137, Phil begins a 3-page story about how great he was at reading Howard Lederer in a certain hand.

And so on...

The cover of the book tells us that Joe Navarro wrote the book with Marvin Karlins, but it's presented by Phil Hellmuth. What this means is: Joe wrote up everything he could think of and only came out with about 10 pages of actual content. They hired Marvin to spread that out to a full book, but still came up short. So they added Phil Hellmuth to give his endorsement and write a bunch of anecdotes to stretch the story even more. Finally, they threw in a bunch of photos to get up to about 200 pages, still a minimal length for a reference book on poker.

Don't take my word on this - go to a bookstore and look for yourself.

p.s. I'm not a huge fan of Mike Caro's book either. It's just so old. There definitely is a need for a modern, well-written book about poker tells. Anyone have any ideas?

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