Risk Oriented

 

#1 - Watch Body Language

Derrick Parker, a 20-year veteran of the New York Police Department and co-author of Notorious C.O.P., says to look for physical clues, especially sweating and fidgeting.

 

#2 - Seek Detail

Liars' stories often lack detail, says Lindsay Moran, a former CIA officer and author of Blowing My Cover: My Life as a CIA Spy. Her solution: Push your subject for particulars. The more minutiae a liar has to provide, the more likely he is to slip up.

 

#3 - Beware Unpleasantness

"Liars are noticeably less cooperative than truth-tellers," found psychologists Bella M. DePaulo and Wendy L. Morris in a review of studies on deception. "Liars also make more negative statements and complaints than truth-tellers do, and they appear somewhat less friendly and pleasant," they write in The Detection of Deception in Forensic Contexts.

 

#4 - Observe Eye Contact

A subject's failure to make eye contact is often sign of deceit, say both former NYPD officer Parker and former CIA agent Moran.

 

#5 - Signs of Stress

Look for dilated pupils and a rise in vocal pitch. Psychologists DePaulo and Morris found that both phenomena were more common in liars than truth-tellers.

 

#6 - Listen for the Pause

Forced to make up a story on the spot, most speakers will take a beat or two to collect their thoughts.

 

#7 - Ask Again

Police interrogators often ask suspects to repeat their stories, and listen for inconsistencies to ferret out lies. But be careful: "Smart people maintain the consistency of lies better than dumb people," says psychologist Robert Feldman, a professor of psychology at the University of Massachusetts.

 

#8 - Beware Those Who Protest Too Much

Someone who consciously is trying to make you think he's honest--for instance, by injecting the phrase "to be honest"--may be lying. Most people assume they will be trusted most of the time. If someone expects otherwise, take a moment to ask yourself why.

 

#9 - Know Thyself

One reason liars succeed is that listeners don't really want to know the truth, says psychologist Feldman. So be honest with yourself about what it is you want to hear. You may wish to believe that a trusted employee didn't have his hand in the cookie jar. But does his story actually make sense?

 

#10 - Work on Your Intuition

"Good human lie detectors, if there are such persons, are likely to be good intuitive psychologists. They would figure out how a person might think or feel if lying in a particular situation, compared to telling the truth, then look for behavioral indications of those thoughts or feelings," write psychologists De Paulo and Morris

Spotting Bluffs, Online Poker Tells

As an online poker player, I'm pretty sure that this advice can be translated to the virtual felt. In online poker though, spotting bluffers requires attention to a different type of tells. You simply don't have the eye contact and the body language to work with.

My favorite tell is the speed with which an opponent acts, called a timing tell. Timing tells are particularly useful in Heads-Up poker, when you only need to focus on one opponent. Find out what it means when a player makes a very fast raise (snap raise) in the postflop game. To me, it usually equals a bluff, because typically it means that the player decided to raise before the cards were dealt, but each player's timing tells are different. This is particularly true when dealing with continuation bets. 

Of course, this tell is not foolproof (no tell is for that matter). A really crafty player may actually choose to disguise his hand strength this way. It all depends on the table texture. And speaking of table texture we must always remember that we have access to the past hand history. Judging a player by his hand frequency and continuation bet frequency is usually the type of analysis that yields the best results.