A high-powered meeting of poker minds is set for the opening days of the summer poker season, where some of the sharpest minds in poker will be on hand for the ultimate prep session at Phil Galfond's Beyond the Game 2025 Summer Summit at Virgin Hotel Las Vegas from May 26–28.
The summit will bring together serious players who want to take their approach to the next level, both in the game and beyond. Players like Brian Rast, Jeremy Ausmus, and 2024 WSOP Player of the Year Scott Seiver will be on hand to lend their unique high-stakes insight, along with a variety of speakers from the mental side of the game.
Blake Eastman is a former psychology professor, long-time poker player, and developer of the Beyond Tells program, will take a deep dive on re-learning what we might know about poker tells, based in part on his massive behavior study on poker players.
Cutting through the nonsense
"Most of the material on poker tells is just an oversimplification and collection of an individual player's bias," Eastman says. "And most of it is just quite frankly nonsense."
"There hasn't been a vernacular or mechanism for describing behavior. It's very difficult to use. And because we don't apply it more empirically, it's a lot more difficult to use. But the truth is, we did studies spanning three years, and I worked with some of the biggest players in the world, analyzing Triton games, PokerGO footage, everything, WSOP, all of that. There are patterns and there are ways of approaching human behavior at the poker table that can have a considerable ROI and be considerably more advantageous to players who are grounded in a strong theoretical base."
It's not always about what to look for, Eastman says, it's often about what not to look for.
"The majority of poker players have this collection of patterns in their heads that, when they see, they basically look for it. They're like looking for the time when the person does this or that. It's not the most effective way to approach it."
'The hands are both eyes.'
There's so much more to human behavior than a single "tell" can explain. Our brain is operating with thousands of data points on our behalf. We even have a lot of the most important body parts wrong.
"In our study, we showed that the single highest value for patterns in behavior are the hands. Nothing compares to it. It's like the whole notion of a poker face is kind of comical because the hands are both eyes."
There are also those players who sit very still to avoid giving off any tells at all. To the untrained eye, stillness means nothing, but there are degrees of stillness. "If you actually look at the stillness and you hold a hundred examples side by side and you show it to a casual observer, they just look really still. But then, if you actually do behavioral analysis and you really look at the behaviors, they're hyper still in one spot, and then they're kind of still in another spot. And then you start to look at the patterns that map back to the hand strength and all of that, and there's some very useful stuff there."
Applying the method is difficult because we are all different poker players with different instincts. This is about teaching players a system that can work for their game.
"The way to approach it is a more systems-driven approach. And the reason why it's such a hard skill set to teach or understand is because you've got to do it in alignment with that player's skill set and capabilities."
"I've worked with top players who thought would be really good at this, and they're not. And I've worked with some players that I thought would be terrible at this, and they're actually quite good. Behavior could be an edge for every single player. You just need to know and carve out what that edge is."
The method
Studying tells and developing a system requires watching tape — a lot of it. Almost anything a player does at a poker table is a behavior that can be coded and observed. From your degree of stillness to the amount of time it takes to check your cards — it's all data.
"We use something called grounding theory. Grounding theory is a research methodology that is not hypothesis-driven. You basically get a data set, and you come up with a method for coding behaviors. And then you see what the data tells you. One of the things that we did was we counted the length of time it takes a person to check their cards."
The timer would start when the player looked at their cards and measure the length of their gaze. The results were surprisingly consistent.
"What we found is that it's a very interesting distribution where when players were on top of their range, they checked their cards quickly. When they're at the bottom of their range, they check their cards quickly. But when they're marginal, and whatever that perception of marginal is to them, they spend a little bit more time looking at them."
But poker is dynamic, and marginality is relative to the spot that you're in, Eastman says. Getting to the heart of the matter is a puzzle.
"The more context you add to the data, the more it makes sense."
The Beyond the Game 2025 Summer Summit will run at Virgin Hotel Las Vegas from May 26–28, and special early bird pricing is still available through May 10.
Image courtesy of The Nonverbal Group.
