poker logo

Caro’s Book of Poker Tells: The Psychology and Body Language of Poker

Rating: 4/10

Cost: $24.95

The Nuts: Good for keeping your own tells in check.

The Muck: Almost all the tells are exaggerated and the photos are of the poorest quality.
Recommended For: Beginner players

This is one poker book that needs to be taken with a huge grain of salt. First, throw out all the tells that have to do with players showing their cards to friends/family/observers/and pets because card rooms tend to enforce a “one player per hand” rule.

Throw out the charts Caro uses for draw poker using Jokers, and all the hype he writes about how great he thinks he is. And go ahead and throw out about half of the blurry, dark photos in which you cannot make out facial expressions.

What you have left is a small collection of fairly exaggerated descriptions of tells that Caro claims you can use to tell when an opponent is bluffing.

You will have to work hard to glean a good dose of useful information from this book. Caro takes a lot of obvious advice, repeats it twice, and then beats you over the head with it.

Caro believes you can use tells to gain insight into what your opponent might be holding. The problem with this, however, is that he sets up fairly exaggerated scenarios, describing very obvious gestures, to illustrate a predictable outcome.

For instance, Caro says that you should “call any bettor whose hand covers his mouth” because it’s likely a sign that he’s bluffing. Advice like this is too “black and white” for poker.

Caro came up with this particular piece of advice on mouth-covering by observing one game of lowball in 1980. Mouth-covering occurred 67 times, and from that tiny “scientific” study Caro dives into all these theories on what he thinks most of those players had, even though he rarely saw the bettors’ hands.

Studies like these should be carried out over years, examining many different players and different poker games, and not just over the course of an evening.

The tone of Caro’s book can sound like he’s always patting himself on the back. There are hardly any grand ideas in this book, even though Caro thinks there are.

It would take an incredible amount of time and effort to put this whole book into practice; because if there are tells out there as plain as Caro makes them out to be, they sure are few and far between, and you had better be ready to catch one if it falls your way.

For one positive note, however, it may be worth flipping through this book to catch any unknowing but obvious tells you have been giving during your own play. Otherwise, make important decisions based on your cards and not someone else’s averted eyes.

Done Reading Caro's Book of Poker Tells? Return to Poker Book Reviews