Poker Book Report: Read 'em and Reap by Joe Navarro

A while back Annie Duke was challenged to see how well she could do at deciphering if a person was lying or not. She participated in an experiment for The Discovery Channel alongside a psychic, and an FBI agent named Joe Navarro. All with seemingly inherent skills at finding the underlying truth of an individual answering questions using observations of posture, tone, expressions, words and anything else they deemed valid to the discovery.

Navarro and Duke did very well during this test, while the psychic professional didn't do nearly as good. Hence the beginning for Duke of discovering even more tells than she already knew while picking Navarro's brain and trying to relate some of that information to the poker table.

At the time Navarro did not play poker, and hadn't really equated his skills to the field. This book changes all that. Read 'em and Reap parlays Navarro's extensive FBI intelligence skills into new poker skills unbeknownst by most. Let me say here, that this is far beyond the Mike Caro Book of Tells in that it examines what Navarro describes as part of the brain known as the limbic brain.

This part of the brain functions in a way that reacts to natural stimuli around our bodies, usually associated with dangerous or protective emotions that are somewhat involuntary. How these reactions are controlled, harnessed, and exhibited at a poker table can divulge key feelings a player has about his hand, the community cards, and his plan of action.

For the most part, this book is written quite well, straight up as it were. Not a lot of humor in this as, well, Joe was an FBI agent. More to the point: there is striking content in here that will offer up new information and skills to the most experienced players out there. If you play live games or tournaments it's going to be quite hard to ignore the content in this book, especially since you can easily envision your opponents having this information on you.

An interesting exercise worthwhile here is to read the book, and then go watch those WPT reruns all over again. In the first episode I picked at random, I spotted 2 tells, 1 of them was on a professional player, and the other one on a player that was actually under the table! Yeah, there's lots in this book about that! Needless to say, the book will add valuable dimensions to my live game.

Phil Hellmuth is on the cover, and writes a few short pages in here as well as an introduction, but that does more for him than it does for Navarro. Joe didn't need Phil to market this book and if you thought by the cover that this was another lame "I am Phil Hellmuth monologue", it isn't at all. Phil just hooked up with a far better writer, with far more valuable content to offer the poker market.