CardSharp

Author: Mike Caro

Publisher: Cardoza

This book has been the definitive work on poker tells (physical and vocal mannerisms that indicate the strength of a player’s hand) since in came out. It catalogs numerous tells, provides pictures of players exhibiting the tell, and discusses strategies to exploit a given tell when it appears. In addition, Caro develops a more general theory of tells, explaining why players exhibit tells and classifying them into categories.

I believe the majority of the information in this book is highly accurate, and I have spotted the majority of the tells several times. When I’ve acted on those observations, the results have been good far more often than not. This book has more than paid for itself.

There are some minor issues with Caro’s book. The hourly rate improvements he suggests you can obtain by spotting a given tell are absurdly high. And the accuracy numbers for various tells are useful for comparison purposes only. In a future post, I’ll discuss a more rational system for measuring the accuracy of tells. Furthermore, he missed what is in my opinion the single most important tell in poker. Again, I’ll explain in a separate post.

That said, this is a great book and every player should buy and study it carefully.

rating: 4/5