Okay, here’s the first one, at 1:42: Damon raises pre-flop and KGB smooth-calls with his AA, saying “Position raise. Watch the clip once through, if you have time, and see if you notice examples of disclaimers. In the first scene in Rounders between Teddy KGB and Matt Damon (I’ll just call him Matt Damon instead of Mike D.), the match ends with Damon getting A9 on a board of A8993 for the full house and KGB having AA for the higher full house. Even a lot of experienced players will do subtle variations of this (although experienced players will also be capable of switching these kinds of things up, so it’s best to only trust it from players who you think are predictable.) If an amateur player tries to make excuses for why he’s betting or raising, you should be very wary.

This is a very classic example of a disclaimer, and many amateurs do this. Fishman is trying to suggest that he is tired of being pushed around and that is why he is fighting back. Hellmuth bets into Fishman and Fishman feigns uncertainty, saying “I’m not gonna let you do this to me again, Phil.” Then he pushes all in.

Here’s a very obvious one from the PokerStars Big Game (start at 14 minutes) where amateur David Fishman makes the nuts on the river against Phil Hellmuth. It’s like when an amateur player moves all-in with the nuts and says “I’m pretty short, might as well go all in.” (Here’s a link to a previous post about disclaimers.)īefore going on, though, let’s look at an example of this poker tell from a real game, just so you know this has real-world application. Both of them exhibit a kind of poker tell I call “disclaimers”, which are verbal statements designed to explain away (in other words, disclaim) the meaning behind an action. Both Teddy KGB and Mike McDermott (Matt Damon’s character) exhibit a few poker tells besides the infamous Oreo cookie one. My email acquaintance Michael Blinder recently wrote to point out something very awesome in the movie Rounders. Hi, I’m Zach Elwood, the author of the books Reading Poker Tells and Verbal Poker Tells, and the creator of a new poker tells video series.

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