Decision Science

New Book · Coming This November Welcome to the Jungle Every poker player wants an edge. Dan “Jungleman” Cates wanted to understand the game itself. The Unauthorized Biography of Dan "Jungleman" Cates · Legends of Poker, Book Four · By Ed Reif The sizzle reel: 44 seconds, from a Maryland basement to a high-roller table in North Cyprus. Watch on YouTube . Hand nine of the sixth match. The river is an ace. It is late on a Tuesday in North Cyprus, more than nine hours after the first card, and the room has the look rooms get when they have watched too much. Chairs pushed back. Commentators hoarse. Across the table a Finnish crypto entrepreneur pushes his chips into the middle, and the pot swells to roughly €7.7 million, the largest ever shown on a poker broadcast. A waiter arrives with food. Dan Cates takes a bite of a breadstick. Then he folds. That is the clip that travelled. It is the wrong thing to remember, or half of the r...

New Book · The Elixir Me and My Big Mouth Poker taught a generation to hide its emotions. Mike Matusow made a career out of showing his. The Unauthorized Biography of Mike "The Mouth" Matusow · Legends of Poker, Book Three · By Ed Reif The sizzle reel: 51 seconds, from a 2005 jail cell to two million-dollar paydays. Watch on YouTube . The sound arrives first. Not voices. Chips. Thousands of clay discs riffled between thousands of fingers in a Las Vegas ballroom where almost nobody is speaking. The young players sit in hoods and scarves and dark glasses. They learned this game from software, and the software taught them that a face is a leak. Then one man starts talking. He has been talking for thirty years, at the table, on ESPN, into a microphone in the home studio he calls the Swamp. He has never once learned to stop. This book is about why. It begins with a bet he didn't play Binion's Horseshoe, 1998. A former dea...

New Book · The Elixir Queen of the Big Game They called her a legend. The pros just called her dangerous. The Unauthorized Biography of Jennifer Harman · By Ed Reif The sizzle reel: 41 seconds, from a fake ID in Reno to the glass walls of Bobby's Room. Watch on YouTube . Every poker player learns the difference between risk and ruin. Jennifer Harman learned it in a hospital bed before she ever learned it at a table. She told the story on Broke Living with JRB , across from Jean-Robert Bellande, a man who once pressed his face to the glass of the room where she played. Nobody had written her story down. So I did. It begins with a question San Francisco, 2004. Seven hours of surgery. The kidney her father gave her as a teenager has finally worn out, and a second one has just gone in. In Las Vegas, a Texas billionaire named Andy Beal is in town looking for the best players alive, and the best players alive have pooled their money to m...

New Book · The Elixir Broke Living, High Rolling He spent a lifetime going broke in the company of millionaires—and somehow came away convinced he was the luckiest man in poker. The Unauthorized Biography of Jean-Robert Bellande · By Ed Reif The trailer: 45 seconds, from a dining room in Taipei to the glass walls of Bobby's Room. Watch on YouTube . Every poker player learns it eventually: the cards grade the hand, not the decision. It took four episodes of a podcast to show me a man who had built an entire life inside that sentence. The podcast is Broke Living with JRB . The man is Jean-Robert Bellande. Over four conversations, one on his own and three with the people who were in the room (Patrik Antonius, Jennifer Harman, and David "Viffer" Peat with Shawn "Shiki" Sheikhan), he had more or less told his autobiography out loud. Nobody had written it down. So I did. It begins with a pair of sunglasses The Bellagi...

The Poker Lobotomy • The Poker Tells • Complete Series 59 Poker Tells. Zero Guarantees. The complete poker tells masterclass. A sigh is not a confession. A stare is not a threat. Every tell arrives at the table wearing a costume. Before you believe the story, check who sewed it. Format: 59 live poker tells, one leak and one rule each Sources: Caro, Elwood, Hughes, Navarro, Eastman, Schoonmaker, Ekman, Blay Creator: Ed Reif Tells are evidence, not verdicts. The math picks the zone. The tell breaks the tie. How to Read Poker Players Without Fooling Yourself I spent years in classrooms where a misread signal had consequences measured in metal and altitude. You learn something in rooms like that. People broadcast all the time. Most of what they broadcast is noise. The skill is not hearing more. The skill is knowing which signal changed, and why. The poker table is a smaller room with lower stakes and better lighting. But the problem is the same. A man bets the river, t...