Poker & Body Language

When my great friend and mighty conquerer, Pinky, was busy practicing body language methods on his girl, I was trying to outsmart my friends in the medieval game - Poker, "Texas hold 'em" to be precise...

Though I spent countless years sitting behind a round table, this game caught me off-guard. I have to admit, it's my first and a half try in this game, given the first half was in a bachelor's party when my blood was toxic of alcohol :)

The competition was evenly spread, ranging from a grand master, Sir Galahad, whom brought the unique (and as I later discovered, EXTREMELY expensive) chips, all the way to my lovely princess for whom it was the first table game ever.

Armed with my royal body language skills (I wish it was a flush) I have tried to go with a double strategy: First, learning each player's unique body language in different situations. Second, trying to control and observe my own body language, in an effort to convey some false leads when needed.

On the second round, I lost almost half of my chips to the amazing princess... I was not alone. Even Sir Galahad fell right in the net. Then I realized 2 things:

A - I am an idiot, risking so much, so soon and so fast.
B - Interpreting body language requires you to first learn what is the normative behavior and then search for "anomalies". It sounds obvious, (Pinky and I discussed this last week and called the procedure of observing "baselining") but it's rather complicated analyzing 5 people at once, scrutinizing each expression and creating a baseline for every one.

To make a short story even shorter, me and Sir Galahad were the last players at the table, Galahad with 6 times more chips than me. Time was of the essence, so each round was "all-in" with Galahad wining just after I reduced his lead to a 2:1 chips ratio.

Strategically speaking : I tend to attribute my relative success mainly to the second strategy. Apparently, controlling your own body language, once you are aware of certain things, is pretty convincing to the untrained eye.

Regarding the first strategy of learning my fellow knights body language, only partial success could be claimed here. Two were fairly "convenient" to understand, one was more puzzling and the other two were hard nuts to crack.

Well, this post was way longer than expected, but I am happy it was completed at last.

Disclaimer: I am not a native English writer/speaker/whatever, so bare with me, and if you can't then you are welcome to write to DKDC@DKDC.com :)

Sir Lancelot.