Review: Phil Hellmuth Presents "Read'Em and Reap"

Each month I will take some time to talk about a poker related product and voice my opinion about it, for the good or for the bad. Being that the Christmas Holidays have recently passed, and you might have some gift certificates laying around, I wanted to give you January's review early. Now you can spend your extra money on something worth wild instead of on something silly.

This January I would like to talk about Phil Hellmuth Presents Read'Em and Reap.

Phil Hellmuth Presents "Read'Em and Reap", known as 'REAP' through out the rest of this review, is written by Joe Navarro, a retired FBI special agent; with guest Marvin Karlins and commentary by 11 time WSOP bracelet winner, Phil Hellmuth. The book is published by HarperCollings Publishers.

To understand a little about what REAP has in store you must first take a look at the man who wrote the text. Joe Navarro has 25 years of counterintelligence/counterterrorism experience as a special agent for the FBI, and is know as a "human lie detector". In 2004 Joe was invited on a Discovery Channel feature entitled "More Than Human" where they gathered a hand full of people who's life profession was reading people's lies. These human lie detectors were matched up against a polygraph, a voice stress analyzer, and a pupil dilation apparatus. Each human, and machine, were presented with 25 verbal statements and then had to determine if the subject was lying or telling the truth. Joe was able to nail 18 correct answers, better then two machines, which out beat every human but one, Annie Duke, who also scored 18 correct out of 25. Joe was amazed at Annie's ability to read people, and thus his interest in poker began. Joe assisted Annie in strengthen her ability to pick up tells, and hiding her own, and was very successful. Soon after, Joe was being hired by dozens of professional players for analyzing their play to become more solid and unpredictable. Through all this, Joe ended up teaching at Camp Hellmuth and thus his relationship with Phil Hellmuth began.

Once Joe realized that poker players take tells very serious, he decided to make a book that reveals some of the most common, but often over looked, tells in poker. His book covers the following topics:

• How to conceal your own tells
• The most honest parts of the human body
• Tells of Engagement
• High- Low-confidence Tells
• Pacifying behaviors
• Acting "Hollywooding"
• And other topics, including on how to handle a Pro player if he is at your table.
  

Each topic is it's own chapter. Some topics span over multiple chapters which makes the book a total of 198 pages. REAP is very easy to read, grammatically and visually. Most tells feature a large, clear picture of the action being taken place. The topics transition easily from one to the other, with key points being stressed more then once. At the end of each major "lesson", Phil Hellmuth comments on what Joe just preached and enlightens you on how he was able to use such lesson as a benefit in real life.

Phil's comments are short, and to the point. They do not take away from the reading, but they also do not add much to it either.

The tells in this book do not nearly reach the amount of tells Caro's Book of Poker Tells, however; the tells discussed in this book are far more in depth and are demostrated clearer than in Caro's book. This book is purely about quality over quanity. REAP also features tells that are not mentioned in Caro's book, some that seem more obvious once your eyes are opened up to them. Reader's of Caro's Book of Poker Tells should find the information in this book helpful and insightful - not a waste of time and money.

REAP is an excellent book, especially for under $20, you really can't go wrong. I personally have been able to apply tells learned from this book to my live game. I have made some great laydowns, and great calls by being able to read my opponent from lessons learned from reading REAP. While I did fine Caro's book helpful and interesting, REAP is a book I will be revisiting more often due to it's ease of reading, detailed analysis, and more modern approach to the subject.

My verdict: Buy it