Annie vs. The FBI

Let me tell you about the time I met an FBI interrogator named Joe Navarro. Why? Because it was a turning point in my No Limit Hold’em game.

Last March, I was asked to do an episode of a show called More Than Human on the Discovery Channel. The premise for the episode was to pit human lie detectors against machine lie detectors. They found three people whose living depended on detecting lies: a psychic named Dr. Turri, an FBI interrogator (Joe Navarro) and a poker player (me). The idea was to have the three of us watch the host answer 25 questions. Some of the answers would be lies and some would be the truth. Our abilities to detect truth from fiction would be compared to that of three lie detecting machines — a polygraph machine, a machine that detects changes in the voice and a machine that detects pupil dilation.

I had the pleasure of chatting with Joe throughout the two days we were filming and it was pure enlightenment. As a poker player, it is very important for me to be able to accurately detect lies, since bluffing is essentially just another form of fibbing. I’ve always known that there are certain things a bluffer does with their face — rapid blinking, pursing of the lips — and body movements — sitting with an aggressive posture, banging their chips in the pot. I thought I knew a lot of these kinds of involuntary reactions to lying, but Mr. Navarro soon showed me what a neophyte I was.

FBI interrogators spend their lives questioning suspects. They can spend hours with each interviewee, asking them the same questions over and over again. They can gauge the subtle differences in a suspect’s behavior when they are answering innocuous questions, versus highly charged questions. And because these reactions are the cornerstone of the interrogation, there is a lot written in FBI journals about what kinds of things to look for.

Joe Navarro was kind enough to share some the articles he had written for these journals. That day, my poker game took a jump to the next level.

Reading Joe’s articles helped me put names to some of the things I instinctively knew —names like ‘hooding’— an extended blink that suspects often display just before they tell a lie. I learned that when women are uncomfortable they tend to put their hands to the front of their necks, and when men are uncomfortable they put their hands to their chins. People tend to grimace right before they tell a lie — they show a slight smile right before they begin to speak. And I learned that liars often show ‘self-soothing’ behavior such as stroking their fingers.

FBI interrogators need to detect the same thing that poker players do — they need to know with certainty when suspects are lying and when they are telling the truth. Poker players need to know when opponents are bluffing and when they have a hand. We essentially have the same jobs.

So how did the humans do in the lie detection test? Well, not surprisingly, the psychic performed at less than 50% accuracy. But Joe Navarro and I tied — we both were accurate on 18 of the 25 answers the host gave. And we both beat all but one of the machines. So go find some FBI journals to read; I promise that they will take your game to the next level.

You can play poker with Annie Duke at Ultimatebet.com.

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