Phil Hellmuth Presents Read 'Em and Reap: A Career FBI Agent's Guide to Decoding Poker Tells

Phil Hellmuth Presents Read 'Em and Reap: A Career FBI Agent's Guide to Decoding Poker Tells
by Joe Navarro, Marvin Karlins, Phil Hellmuth

Phil Hellmuth Presents Read 'Em and Reap: A Career FBI Agent's Guide to Decoding Poker Tells
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Book Summary Information

Author: Joe Navarro, Marvin Karlins, Phil Hellmuth
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2006-11-07
ISBN: 0061198595
Number of pages: 240
Publisher: Collins Living

Book Reviews of Phil Hellmuth Presents Read 'Em and Reap: A Career FBI Agent's Guide to Decoding Poker Tells

Book Review: A good introduction to tells, but do we really care?
Summary: 4 Stars

So I've read about this book being called out for not having enough content and having too many photos and repetitive information. This is absolutely right, and would be a complete condemnation of this book...if this was a book about pot odds, or Harrington's M value. But it's not, it's a book about tells. I would challenge anyone to try to write a book about body language with just text. It can't be done. To be honest, this probably shouldn't even be a book. It should be a video where Phil and Joe just sit in front of a screen and point out other players' tells. It would be even better/more entertaining if they tried to read what people had as you saw their actual hands. Think about it, you'd get to watch experts call each other's tells, and you would be able test the accuracy of Hellmuth's god-given ability to read people. Brilliant. If someone doesn't do this within the next year, I'm pitching it to the Brat.

This is just the long way of saying that the book has good value if you're really looking to learn tells. But it does beg the question, how important are tells in actual play? Well, if you play online, not at all, obv. But if you decide to actually enter a poker room and play the game face to face, it's fun to think that learning to read tells could help establish you as a winning player.

This is where I have an issue with the idea of the book. And it has nothing to do with the quality of this particular book--after all, I'm giving it 4 stars. It's just that tells aren't that important. There are so many other (and more accurate) ways to figure out what a player is holding based upon their actual tendencies and playing histories. Plus, people get into the mindset that somehow reading someone is going to give you the right play. Well, as you know from reading Sklansky's Theory of Poker (I assume you have), even if you had the ability to see everyone's hands, it still takes a lot of knowledge and skill to know what to do with that information, such as knowing when, even if the percentages aren't in your favor, the pot odds make a call worth it. Too many people think that poker is about reading tells, and books like this, even if they are well put together as this one is, just perpetuates that mistake.

Summary of Phil Hellmuth Presents Read 'Em and Reap: A Career FBI Agent's Guide to Decoding Poker Tells

very great player knows that success in poker is part luck, part math, and part subterfuge. While the math of poker has been refined over the past 20 years, the ability to read other players and keep your own "tells" in check has mostly been learned by trial and error.

But now, Joe Navarro, a former FBI counterintelligence officer specializing in nonverbal communication and behavior analysis-or, to put it simply, a man who can tell when someone's lying-offers foolproof techniques, illustrated with amazing examples from poker pro Phil Hellmuth, that will help you decode and interpret your opponents' body language and other silent tip-offs while concealing your own. You'll become a human lie detector, ready to call every bluff-and the most feared player in the room.

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