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?

Liars

This post briefly explores the idea that extroverts are better at lying than introverts.

This has some application to poker and tells. One of the common tells is that most players tend to shut up, even freeze up, when bluffing. The research above suggests that is more likely to be a reliable tell among non-extroverts. The loud and gregarious types are less likely to exhibit this tell.

Initial tells

F-train makes some comments about predicting the behavior of a stranger based on initial physical observations. He uses an example of people getting into an elevator. He says he can pretty well predict whether they are the type that will stare at the floor, stare at the numbers on the screen, etc. based on their general physical appearance.

Of course, he makes the extension that such initial impressions can be useful in making initial catogorizations of poker players also. He made some good observations about people. The post is well worth reading. His observations are more people specific than poker specific. But that's really what reading people is all about.

He's talking about some characteristics that were discussed rather extensively in
Caro's Book of Poker Tells