Even good poker players act on a tell only a couple of times a day. Zach Elwood told me that, and he wrote three books on poker tells.
Zach played poker for a living from 2003 to 2007. He wrote Reading Poker Tells, Verbal Poker Tells and Exploiting Poker Tells, and he says they have sold more than 48,000 copies in eight languages. He now hosts People Who Read People, a behavior and psychology podcast. When a man with that record says reading people is hard, I pay attention.
Here is how he put it: "Even good readers of tells might only change a decision based on the tell like a couple times in a full day, eight-hour session."
Why a read pays at the poker table
Zach explains why a read still pays at the poker table. Players repeat the same situations under fixed rules. Many decisions are close to even, so a weakly reliable read can change the answer on a close call, and the small edges add up over thousands of hands. An interrogation room gives you one conversation with a stranger and none of that structure. Zach points to Tim Levine's research in Duped on the limits of nonverbal lie detection.
So why does an industry sell the skill? Zach's answer starts with demand. I would add the buyer. Most of us want the easy answer, and the market rewards the best story. Zach's line on it: "Something being interesting and captivating does not mean it's true."
We also talked about intuition. Zach uses Gary Klein's approach from Sources of Power. He takes a gut read and names the factors behind it. This is where Boyd comes in for me. Orientation sits at the center of the OODA loop. Genetics, culture and previous experience shape what you perceive before you decide anything. A gut read comes out of orientation, and you can only check it once you can say what it is reading.
You can't be results oriented
Then I asked Zach whether kids should play poker. He said yes, and then he said this: "You can't be results oriented. All you can do is make the best decisions you can at any given time."
A decision goes out into an environment nobody controls. The outcome that comes back mixes your decision with everything else. A good process can lose, and a bad one can win for a long time. Near the end Zach said, "But I think at the end of the day, so much of what we do is gambling."
If you heard Kent Clizbe last week, listen to the two episodes together. Kent made the case for judging credibility through context, and Zach shows what a read is worth when the context is thin.
Where has a good outcome hidden a bad decision for you?
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No Way Out on YouTube: https://youtube.com/@nowayoutpodcast
Written by Ponch Rivera with AI assistance in production. The full conversation is in the player below.