Ex-FBI Agent Calls Poker Players' Bluffs

By ELAINE SILVESTRINI The Tampa Tribune

Published: May 27, 2007

TAMPA - After 25 years in the FBI chasing spies and other bad guys, Joe Navarro prowls in the dimly lit poker room at the Seminole Hard Rock Casino the way Dian Fossey roamed a gorilla habitat.

Unobtrusive, so as not to affect their behavior, Navarro eyes clusters of players hunched over green felt, clinking their chips, sliding their cards, strategizing.

The former fed's highly developed expertise in translating body language has turned into a hot commodity in the gritty world of gambling, where a book he recently co-wrote is in high demand and his seminars are commended by the pros.

The casino is a living laboratory, a place for Navarro to study and immediately know whether his hypotheses are correct.

"Like right now, there's a guy all the way at the end, and his feet are jittery," Navarro says, pointing to someone sitting at a game table across the room. "He's excited about something. … He just put some chips in. He's probably got a great hand because he's got happy feet. … His posture just changed. He just elevated his posture. He's really excited about something. The question is, does somebody have a better hand?"

It's a long way from the days when national security or the ability to assemble a criminal case might be riding on Navarro's assessment of whether a suspect was lying.

"This fellow here with the yellow shirt, right there, he's leaning away," Navarro says, pointing to someone else. "When he has a great hand, he leans forward. When he's weak, he just goes upright or he pulls away. He's very easy to tell."

To Navarro, 54, it's not a big leap from law enforcement to poker. In both realms, reading people is paramount to success.

"Now there's a guy who just folded, and before he folded, he had his thumb in his pockets," Navarro says about another player. "Thumbs in the pocket is a low-confidence display. You don't want to do it in the business world."

Black Book

When he's between gigs teaching corporate executives or FBI recruits about body language, Navarro likes to visit the casino and stand at the railing at the edge of the poker room, watching, sometimes for hours.

But Navarro doesn't gamble. He grew up in a family of immigrants; they fled Cuba in 1961 when he was 8. Money was so tight his father walked miles to work to save the bus fare that could buy a quart of milk. Gambling, he says, just wasn't done.

"I like the social aspects of poker," he says. "I think it's great that it brings people together and they're not in front of a TV and they're not in front of a computer. I love that they get together and they socialize and they tell stories. From that perspective, I enjoy it, but … it doesn't have the attraction to me of, say, going flying, which I enjoy, kayaking or something like that."

Still, he keeps a black book of notes, including his observations on the "tells" - body movements that betray emotions - of some well-known players.

He says someone once offered him $50,000 for his notebook.

"There's a lot of crazy money in poker," Navarro says.

But he isn't tempted to use his skills to play for high stakes, he says.

"Even if you read a person just right, on the final card - it's called the river - it could change everything 180 degrees," he says. "So no matter how well you read somebody, no matter how accurate you're doing, it's still gambling. … Every professional player will tell you that as good as they are, at some point, they've been bankrupt; they've lost it all. And you just can't live like that."

Analysis And Instinct

This is not to say Navarro wants to stop others from profiting from what he knows. "If somebody wants to take this information and make lots of money, have at it," he says.

Pro poker players say Navarro's observations have helped them sharpen their skills. He has brought a new kind of thinking - scientific analysis - to an instinctive game in which the ability to read opponents and keep them from reading you can mean everything. Navarro spreads his gospel at paid seminars attended by hundreds.

Poker Hall of Famer T.J. Cloutier says Navarro's seminar was the only one where he ever took notes. "He's just very good at what he does," Cloutier adds.

Another pro, Antonio Esfandiari, says Navarro told him he puckers his lips when he has a good hand. "He was dead on," Esfandiari says. "I was doing it, and I didn't realize it." Navarro also pointed out he had a tendency to look at his cards more than once when he had a good hand and only once when they were bad.

"He is one cool dude," Esfandiari says. "Besides being a good person, he knows what he's talking about more than anyone."

Esfandiari says he wishes Navarro wouldn't help other poker players become better "because then my earnings go down."

Poker champ Phil Hellmuth called Navarro in 2003 after hearing about him from the people who were arranging his poker camp. When Hellmuth asked him to teach at the camp, Navarro says, he told Hellmuth he didn't know the game. That's all right, Hellmuth said, come talk about body language.

Navarro says he had another reason for hesitating. "I have my reputation to worry about," he says. "I still teach at the CIA."

A Davis Islands resident, Navarro decided teaching poker players what he knows would be just an extension of his life as an educator.

Navarro called a friend, his doctor, Juan Ling. "I said, 'Juan, you've got to teach me to play poker,'" Navarro recalls. "He said, 'Hurry over here,' and we literally sat down at his dinner table and he took me step by step."

Navarro plays the game occasionally with Ling for dime pots. "I read him pretty good," Navarro says. "He's just one of those people. He's so honest that everything he feels percolates to the surface, so eventually you see it."

Ling says Navarro may have the ability to read people but lacks the skill that comes from experience playing the game. "If you don't know how to play poker that well, if you don't have a good hand, it doesn't matter how you can read the other person. You don't learn that in one afternoon. … I can still beat him, but he can beat me, too. … Are we about equal? It depends on what day of the week."

Poker Royalty

He may not be revered at his friend's kitchen table, but when Navarro enters the casino poker room for an interview and photo shoot, he's greeted as visiting royalty. "Your book has taken the poker world by storm," gushes poker room Manager Henry Funke. "It's cool to meet you. If you ever want to come and play…"

Navarro's book with Hellmuth, "Read 'em and Reap," has sold 30,000 copies since it was released in November.

Hellmuth says the book is influencing the game. "Now people start faking tells," he says.

Hellmuth says he, too, picked up some ideas.

For example, Navarro says, when people touch the tips of their fingers together in a gesture called a steeple, that's a sign of confidence.

Hellmuth says he sometimes steeples when he wants to bluff. "That's something I got from him. Just a little trick to throw people off."

Poker champion Annie Duke says Navarro is "going to have a big impact." Duke introduced Navarro to the poker world when she met him while filming a show for the Discovery Channel that pitted human experts against machines in trying to detect lies. Navarro and Duke both scored correctly eight out of 10 times, performing significantly better than a polygraph machine, Duke says.

Over the two days of shooting the program, Duke says, she got to know Navarro, and they both learned a lot about each other.

After the shoot, she says, "I wrote an article saying these two days I spent with Joe Navarro really changed my life." She says Navarro helped her understand the reasons for what she knew instinctively about the behavior of other players. Instead of just having a feeling in her gut that someone's bluffing, she now knows the behaviors she observes that give her that insight, and if she reads someone wrong, she can go back and analyze what she saw. When her judgments were based solely on instinct, she says, she couldn't re-evaluate them.

"It brought it up from the level of intuition up to the level of knowledge," she says.

Navarro told her she sometimes transmits her emotions by pursing her lips, Duke says. Consequently, "I became a mouth breather at the table," she says.

Has Navarro helped her game? "I don't know if I've done better," she says. "After I talked to him, I went out and won a tournament for $2 million. I don't know if it had anything to do with it, but it can't hurt."

Is Navarro going to change poker as a game?

"Reading [people] has always been a part of poker," Duke says. "I don't think it's going to change things." Then she adds, Navarro's insights are "going to create better poker players, which I guess changes poker."

Navarro says he is always learning. For example, he says, women have a tendency, when they're nervous or threatened, to touch the notch at the base of their necks. The theory is this is an instinct hard-wired in the brain to cover a vulnerable area of the body in the face of danger.

Once, at a casino in Atlantic City, N.J., Navarro watched two pregnant women sitting at different tables.

"When they were weak, they started to go for the neck, but at the last minute, the hand went down and covered the fetus," Navarro says. That "buttresses the theory that we cover and we protect what's important."

Navarro says he participates as a speaker in poker seminars about five times a year. Those seminars, which also include entertainment, can draw hundreds of people and cost $600 to $1,000 to attend. In addition, twice a year, he has seminars through his Web site, navarropoker.com, limited to 75 attendees. Those cost $999.

Navarro says he tells professional players to videotape themselves and analyze their tells. He also advises them to keep logs on their opponents.

As Navarro talks in the Hard Rock food court, a song by The Police thumps through the casino's sound system.

"Every move you make

Every vow you break

Every smile you fake

Every claim you stake

I'll be watching you."

Reporter Elaine Silvestrini can be reached at (813) 259-7837 or esilvestrini@tampatrib.com.