Chapter 10 of Reading Poker Tells by Zachary Elwood: Appendices

1. Who the author is and why he wrote the book

Zachary Elwood:
- Played professionally for a period, mostly mid-stakes live and online (e.g., $20/40 limit, $5/10 NL).
- Left full-time poker mainly because the psychological strain was too high; he’s happier not grinding all the time.
He doesn’t claim to be:
- A famous pro,
- High-stakes crusher,
- Or ultimate authority on tells.
He does think:
- He’s put more serious work into live behavior than almost anyone,
- And that good tell-readers usually don’t write books—they’d rather keep printing money at the table.
He believes most other “tell books”:
- Are written by low-stakes players or non-poker professionals (e.g., law enforcement),
- Focus on lists of tells instead of how to weigh and apply them in real strategy,
- Often give advice he flatly disagrees with.
His main value add:
Not just “here are tells,” but how to think about them in context and integrate them into winning poker.

Elwood has a love–hate relationship with the game:

He’s disturbed by:
- Exploiting problem gamblers and the chronically losing,
- The ego and self-delusion of many regulars,
- The way smart but overconfident players can wreck their finances while insisting they’re just “unlucky.”
He’s seen:
- A former regular killed in circumstances widely believed to be tied to poker-related financial problems,
- Many people whose overall lives were worse because of the game.
Point to the reader (especially amateurs):
- You may be far more outmatched than you realize.
- There are competent players actively reading you and exploiting you.
- Even if you don’t want to become a psychology wizard, you should at least learn to be less readable.

Elwood specifically addresses Dan Harrington’s downplaying of tells and similar objections.

Harrington: It’s tough to track behavior, connect it to shown hands, and watch many opponents at once.
Elwood:
- Yes, it’s hard—so is everything else in poker worth learning.
- Live poker is slow; there’s plenty of dead time to watch people when you’re not in hands.
- Difficulty isn’t a reason to ignore a potentially big edge.

Elwood agrees it’s messy but says:
- That’s normal in poker; we deal with noisy information all the time.
- Many players simply give up too early; if you stick with it, real patterns emerge.

Harrington argues you may need a lot of history on someone.
Elwood’s counter:
- That’s true—especially vs good players—but you’re not forced to act on flimsy tells.
- You can and should weight tells by reliability:
  - Strongly correlated → give them real weight.
  - Confusing / inconsistent → ignore them and fall back on pure strategy.

Harrington uses an example where the board is so complex that a “strong” tell doesn’t narrow the range much.
Elwood:
- Sure, in a small subset of situations tells don’t help much.
- But there are many more spots where “this player feels strong/weak” sharply influences our decision.
- Especially in close, break-even-feeling spots, even a slightly reliable tell adds real EV across thousands of hands.

Overall conclusion:

You can be a big winner without using tells (like Harrington).
But if Harrington were also good at live behavior, Elwood believes he’d be an even bigger winner.
Tells are “icing,” but there’s more icing available than most pros think.

A grab bag of advice:

Prioritize the loose players.
- They play more hands → more showdowns → more chances to connect behavior to cards.
Study yourself.
- Notice how you behave when bluffing vs value-betting.
- Self-awareness makes it easier to recognize similar patterns in others.
Don’t overrate “intuition.”
- Strong players mostly base decisions on observed evidence, not mystical gut feelings.
- “Going with your gut” is fine only in very close spots where solid info runs out.
Use mandatory calls as study time.
- Even if you’re always calling a river shove (because you have the nuts), pause very briefly to observe:
  - How they sit,
  - How they breathe,
  - Their eyes / posture.
- You then instantly get a free calibration point: behavior ↔ actual hand.
- (Just don’t tank so long that people get angry.)
Real value of sunglasses.
- They’re less about hiding your own tells and more about hiding where you’re looking.
- If opponents don’t realize you’re studying them, they’re less likely to tighten up their behavior.
Headphones trick.
- Wearing headphones (even with sound off) lets you:
  - Avoid unwanted table chatter,
  - Still listen,
  - And benefit from opponents assuming you’re not paying attention.
- People often speak more freely when they think you can’t hear.

Elwood is not selling tells as magic or more important than fundamentals.
He is arguing:
- Live behavior is a real and underused edge,
- The “tells don’t matter” stance is often an excuse to avoid hard, subtle work,
- And if you’re going to play live poker, you’re doing yourself a disservice by ignoring this entire layer of information.
At the same time, he wants casual and losing players to realize:
- The game is deeper and more predatory than they may think,
- And there are players out there reading them much better than they imagine.