Tells

The harder they try to convince you of something, the more likely it's not true. That's often the case in poker, in love, and in the world at large.

The Economist points to a very interesting study by Stanford’s David Larcker and Anastasia Zakolyukina on the use of deception in the business environment (HT: Brian McCann). The article’s title, “How to Tell When Your Boss is Lying,” gets at the thrust of the piece. Larcker and Zakolyukina look at conference call transcripts from 2003 and 2007 for evidence of determinants of companies who later ran into problems in the form of serious financial restatements or accounting errors. Can you identify a CEO or CFO engaging in deceptive conduct during a conference call? What sort of “tells” would you look for?

An old RGP post

Here's a snip of an old RGP post and a comment from Badger that I found on Badger's site:

Gary Carson wrote...
> I've played in games (20/40 games and 3/6 games) where the right
> thing to do with KQo in second position after an under the gun raise
> was to 1) fold 2) call 3) raise. It's not a function of the KQo, it's a
> function of who those other guys are, the kinds of hands that
> under the gun player might have, and what everyone else is likely
> to do if you call and what everyone else is likely to do if you raise.

I wasn't just making the point though of adapting to specific players. Strategic advice should never be an absolute lockstep. Knowledge of your specific opponents is a good thing. However, my point is that strategy/advice should be built around the specific game "type", not just players. There can be reasons for doing either a fold, call or raise with the same hand in the same position when confronted with special circumstances, but a person should have worked out in advance the way they want to most commonly deal with situations, based on the game type they commonly play in. And games vary a lot, from California on one side (usually) to Nevada on the other side (usually) with the rest of the country somewhere in between. The common California game is so different than the common Nevada game that people are not even talking about the same thing when they say "a 15-30 Holdem game".