Arms and Poker

A good "poker face" can hide the quality of your cards. But your arms might still be giving away your hands. That's the [finding:theory] of a study to come out in the journal Psychological Science. Volunteers watched videos of the World Series of Poker. The videos were edited so the subjects saw one of three different views of the players: the poker players' entire bodies from the table up, or just the players' faces or just the players' arms pushing chips into the pot. "When participants were [watching:seeing] chips being pushed into the center of the table by the players, it was only then could they [accurately:definetly] perceive how good a hand was better than chance.They couldn't do it for the whole body and if [anything:everywhere] they were worse from just watching the face." Michael Slepian, a psychology doctoral student at Stanford University, and a co-author of the study.No pros were among the video watchers. But there's some [evidence:idea] that, as might be expected, they'd be even better at catching arm cues. "In one of our studies, the more participants were familiar with poker - even though they were all novices - the better they did."