Negreanu Reveals Rivals’ ‘Tells’

He comes in for a lot of stick these days for his PokerStars connections, but Daniel Negreanu is still one of the most open and funny guys around when it comes to interviews, and recently revealed he has a list of player tells on his phone – as well as jokingly describing Mike ‘The Mouth’ Matusow and Phil ‘Poker Brat’ Hellmuth as “both fucking terrible!”

Negreanu revealed all when he appeared on the ‘Nuts Poker Podcast’ in Norway, a fun Q&A session letting us all in on his secrets, including his phone list of opponents’ tells.

"In this phone there’s a list of players with tells,” he explains, “so whenever I play with them I scroll …alphabetically…and ‘Oh, that’s right, he clasps his…he does this when he’s bluffing, he does this when he has it.”

(Watch from 4:50)

Tell-tale signs

The entertaining interview with Norwegian pair Jon Kim Vik and co-host Fredrik started by asking Negreanu: “What’s your favorite tell?”

"Well, I don’t give them all away necessarily,” he begins, “but what I look for is something unique and different in that moment – so something they do different. Like the eyes, there’s a lot in there – but guys who wear sunglasses, they think ‘Oh, I’m protected, you can’t see me!’ But it’s bull,” says Negreanu. “They do other things, with their neck, their breathing, their arms, so they’re even more easy to read a lot of the time.”

The most reliable tell?

"When the flop comes out and they look at their chips!” says Negreanu. “When he does that, the first thing he’s thinking is ‘I want to bet’. It’s one of the most basic tells, and one of the first you learn.”

The podcast drifts into amusing territory when Negreanu is asked who the worse player is, Mike Matusow or Phil Hellmuth?

“They’re both fucking terrible!” claims Negreanu, perhaps jokingly, adding:

"They’re both ridiculously bad, but I’m going to say Mike is worse."

(Photo: Pokerstars.com)

And his most embarrassing moment?

When he woke up in Cardiff (in England, says Daniel, geography obviously not his strong point!) and realized he’d wet the bed after a drunken night out on the town.

He reveals:

"It was cold and wet, because I’d peed the bed! I pissed myself!”

Negreanu claims that he hung the sheets out the window to dry so that the maids wouldn’t find out.

Probably not a tell we’re going to see when Negreanu plays live, but you never know!