Customer Reviews

Ultimate Guide to Poker Tells: Devastate Opponents by Reading Body Language, Table Talk, Chip Moves, And Much More

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I wavered between a 3 and a 4 rating. If you don't have Mike Caro's "Book of Tells" you will find some good stuff here; if you have the "Book of Tells" you are going to think you have an updated version. It is well written and well organized. As a "Tells" book it is not bad, but the majority is borrowed and thus unoriginal. The authors, who I feel it important to mention, are primarily writers and not poker players(taken from their own "bio" material from the book). They have collected and re-written the tells information from other published works and added a small amount of original material. The original material is a small part of the book and nothing "definitively" new.

Collecting tells information from numerous sources and presenting it as a single source is a very good idea; unfortunately, in my opinion they dropped the ball on what could have been an even better book. My own notebooks contain many tells not even mentioned in this "Ultimate Guide". If they were more serious players or diligent author/ researchers they would have provided us with a much richer and and more complete book of tells, given their title. If it is your first tells book it gets a 4; if not it gets a 3. I don't think it is a bad book, I just don't feel it lives up to it's title or presents any new or especially useful material that is not mostly covered in Caro's book.

The addition of "angle plays" may be quite helpful to newer players and is good advice for protecting your cards and yourself at all times. The book has several merits that Caro's book does not, but Caro's book still holds up surprisingly well even after over twenty years. All in all a helpful book although a little short as "The Ultimate Guide" to tells.

The strategies and facts in the book are well-presented and well-written, and there are several good tidbits of information inside... But as far as being what its title suggests, well, I reckon it's good marketing. It does provide much of the information from Caro's original "Book of Tells" and expands on some of it, but as I wrote a moment ago, it doesn't have anything that someone who's been playing live (not online) poker for a year or so wouldn't know already -- other than a few bits here and there.

I'd recommend this book to beginners and studious amateurs.

I am an online player and therefore very familair with hand percentages, pot odds and basic betting strategy. However, in a live game I sometimes feel a little out of my element. This book opened my eyes to much of what I needed to pay attention too. To fully appreciate the book, you must have a pretty good knowledge of the game, but the book was helpful in that it put a lot of what happens at a live table in context. One would think some of the observations are obvious, but knowing what to look for and pay attention to truly does allow you to better trust your gut and instincts during a game. I don't even look at my cards until I have to anymore. Rather I study the table based on techniques garnered form the book. Not only do learn about the other players at the table through observation, but it helps you set up a strategy for your own behavior when its your turn. Bottom line...highly recommended for the fairly new but serious player.

Well, first let me say a book like this seems very hard to do. I salute the author(s) for trying.

That being said, for my mileage, I thought the book was ridiculous. I know a lot of people have a good opinion of this book, but for the life of me I don't know why---I don't think any of those positive reviews are from serious players?? The only time anything in here would be relevant is if you were playing in a home game where the maximum age was 15 and the maximum sophistication was desert island. Most of the stuff in here is just incorrect, and the few things that ARE correct, no one would need this book to know. For example, it is meticulously described that if a naive opponent sits there and Hollywoods for a long while, looking agonized, and then suddenly makes a huge bet or all-in, then he has a hand. REALLY? Thanks for helping me out with that, sir. That was useful, and was not something any one that would buy a poker book wouldn't have known for years.

Oh, and, if you're playing experienced poker players, then you should be aware that tells can be mimicked and it's possible that your opponent is making an artificial tell as a deception. Ooooooooook. Thanks for that as well. I'm glad the author pointed this out, because only 99.94% of people, and 99.99999912% of people that would buy a poker book, would know this. I mean, really.

So yes, if you've never played poker before, and you're really stupid, this would be a great book. Unlike many other poker books out there, though, I don't think you can actually HARM your game by buying this book. (Which makes it in the upper 25% of poker books, just because it doesn't cause any damage!) So there's at least a silver lining.

That's my humble opinion. Your mileage may vary. But, if you'd like to sit across from me at the Venetian utilizing the techniques outlined in this book, PLEASE, feel free to do so. I would welcome that :)

a decent book but i didnt really get too much out of it that i havent already read or experienced.

I've been playing for about a year and a half, mostly tournaments and mostly online. But I have recently played a couple of live events and also play in a regular home game. I've read several of the strategy books mentioned by the other reviewers here and thought Harrington and Gordon were both great. But I don't agree that the Ultimate Guide to Poker Tells is bad -- granted I haven't read the Caro book, but I got a lot out of this one. The whole idea of how tells occur and how to look for individual ones was new -- I'd noticed some of the things they mention, or read about it as part of other books or articles, but I thought there was a lot of good stuff gathered here. I'm giving it five stars, because for me it was definitely a shortcut to reading tells in live games. Based on the other reviews, I'm guessing that more experienced live game players may already know alot of this stuff. But I think that paying $14 was a bargain vs. the price of learning this stuff "the hard way".

The authors have done a great job of putting everything you need to know about the "body language of poker" into one book -- and making it a great read. I liked the information about where tells fit in to human behavior. It made the later chapters on specific tells much more valuable, and let me apply them to just about any situation. I also liked the photo section, and the tells broken out by game. As a hold'em player, I definitely have gone back to the limit and no limit sections again and again. Perhaps the best thing about the book, though, is that it puts tells in context with game strategy and betting patterns. The authors point out that you can see tells all the time, but you can only use them effectively when you take the total situation into account. The book is really a quick read, not a textbook. Yet it had enough information that I'll be going back to it for years to come. Definitely earns a place of honor on my poker shelf!

This book isn't about strategy at all. It's about playing the players, and all the funky stuff they do. I haven't seen anything else like it (and I've read alot of poker books). It made me smile with recognition, as all the stuff I knew about how players act was on the page. A quick read and miles from the usual odds and outs!