Caro's Book of Poker Tells

One of the ten greatest books written on poker, this must-have book should be in every player's library. If you're serious about winning, you'll realize that most of the profit comes from being able to read your opponents. Caro reveals the secrets of interpreting tells - physical reactions that reveal information about a player's cards - such as shrugs, sighs, shaky hands, eye contact, and many more. Learn when opponents are bluffing, when they aren't and why - based solely on their mannerisms. Over 170 photos of players in action and play-by-play examples show the actual tells. These powerful ideas will give you the decisive edge. 320 pages

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A classic, and one of the most well known books on poker, it's been published again and again under different publishers with very slight changes over the years.

It's one of the only books on tells, or body language in poker - a bit surprising, considering the hundreds of poker books in print, and the popular conception that tells are a huge part of the game.

Caro, also known as "the Mad Genius of Poker," is a top-level poker player, credited as the best draw player in the world. Or was, at least - draw poker all but died out when other forms became legal in California, and he hasn't been heard from as much since then. Regardless, he's still extremely smart, a great teacher, and is always entertaining reading.

The book covers around fifty different "tells," of various types. Some are general profiling, such as what you can infer about an unfamiliar opponent's style by the way they dress or stack their chips. Most are behavioral - what it means when someone acts immediately, without pausing to think, when someone glances down at their chips after the flop, when they "splash" chips into the pot instead of stacking them, etc. A common theme is that "strong means weak" and "weak means strong" - when they sigh and shrug their shoulders as they raise, get out. It seems so basic, but often holds true even at relatively high levels. There are logical tells too, like when a conservative player bets without looking at his last card in stud, he already has a made hand.

One tell I've found very useful is when a player's hand starts to shake uncontrollably as he or she bets on the last round. Most people's initial thought would be that they're nervous and bluffing. In reality, it usually means they have a nearly unbeatable hand. The shaking is a release of tension; a natural, involuntary response as the nervous uncertainty of the hand's outcome is resolved. The shaking is most likely to occur when the stakes are very meaningful to the player. Sometimes this one is visible even on the WPT or WSOP coverage on TV. Even those who play for thousands every day can't control their reactions when they're suddenly playing for millions.

On the downside, the book's age shows. The pictures are grainy and black-and-white, and highlight fashion trends of the 1980s. Several of the tells are specific to draw poker, like determining whether a player who draws one has two pair or a four-flush; not very useful anymore, but still interesting.

For each tell, the text estimates how many weak, average, and strong players will exhibit the specific behavior, and gives a value for how much you can gain by understanding it and being observant. These are useful as generalizations, such as which will rarely apply in a higher limit game against more experienced players, but the "value per hour" figures are crazy. At the $100 limit, various tells are supposedly worth $11/hour, $96, $43, $128, etc. If that were true, a break-even player who studied this book would suddenly be making thousands per hour.

Reading people's body language isn't nearly that big a part of poker. Most decisions at the table are fairly clear based on the cards and logic. Only in borderline situations do tells become valuable, and even then, you have to be pretty sure your read is accurate; if you fold the best hand on the end based on a read you thought was accurate, when you would have called otherwise, you've just cost yourself the whole pot.

Lots of people have bought this book, or similar material, with the idea of studying it and suddenly making a killing, with no more than a basic understanding of poker. This is misguided, and probably not possible. Technical skill and a solid understanding of poker theory and game situations are far more important. Reading people is a useful and interesting supplement to that, not a replacement for playing well.

That said, I'd recommend this book to anyone. Even casual, kitchen table players will find it readable, interesting, and useful - maybe more so than more experienced players since their opponents will have a lot of obvious tells to be read.