There is an entire literature about reading people at a card table, and most of it concerns the hands, the eyes, the breathing — the moment of the decision.

In my experience the moment of the decision is the least informative part of the evening. By then everyone is performing, badly or well, and you are reading the performance.

What Happens in the Ninety Seconds Before Anyone Acts

The information is in the arrival and in the aftermath.

How somebody sits down. Whether they arrange their things. Whether they know where to put their jacket, which tells you whether they have done this in this kind of room before or only in a different kind. Whether they speak to the dealer as a person.

And then afterward: what they do in the thirty seconds following a loss they did not expect. Not the reaction — the recovery. Everyone has some visible reaction. The recovery is where a person's actual relationship to money lives, and almost nobody thinks to manage it because they do not know it is being watched.

A man who loses something meaningful and then orders a drink he was not going to order has told me his whole situation. He does not know he has said anything at all.

Why Everyone Watches the Wrong Sixty Seconds

Because the decision is the dramatic part, and drama draws attention the way it is designed to.

But a decision is the output of a process that finished before the person sat down. Their sizing, their tolerance, what they will do when it goes badly — all of that was determined by their circumstances, their temperament and their week, none of which are visible in the moment they push chips forward. In the moment they push chips forward you can see only whether they are nervous, and nervousness tells you nothing you can use, because both kinds of player are nervous.

This generalizes past the table and it is most of why I sit in rooms saying nothing. The interesting information in a negotiation is not in the offer. It is in how somebody behaved in the twenty minutes before there was anything at stake, when they had no reason to be managing themselves.

There is a further problem, which is that the arrival and the recovery are both cheap to fake once somebody knows they are the signal. I have met perhaps four people who had worked that out and were managing their own coat, deliberately, for the benefit of men like me. All four were formidable. None of them were doing it at a card table — it is a boardroom skill, and it is one of the few things that makes me distrust my own instrument entirely.

The Time This Made Me Confidently, Expensively Wrong

I read a man badly once, in a business setting, and I read him badly precisely because I was good at this.

He arrived poorly. He did not know what to do with his coat, he was deferential to the wrong person in the room, and his recovery after being contradicted was clumsy. I concluded, from a well-practised instinct, that he was out of his depth, and I gave him a great deal less attention than the substance of what he was saying deserved.

He was not out of his depth. He was profoundly uncomfortable in rooms like that one, which is a completely different fact about a person, and he happened to be the most capable operator at the table. I found this out about eight months later from the results, which is the only teacher I fully trust and by far the most expensive one.

“You watched me put my coat down,” he said, much later, when we knew each other well enough. “I could see you deciding.”

I had been reading discomfort as incapacity for probably thirty years, and I had never once noticed the substitution.

The Correction I Apply Now, Imperfectly

I still watch the arrival and the recovery. It is too useful to abandon and I would not know how to stop.

What I have added is a required second question: is what I am seeing a fact about their ability, or a fact about this room? Most of the time it is the room. Rooms like mine are designed to make people feel a particular way and then I sit in them appraising people for feeling that way, which is close to a rigged test.

I get this wrong less than I did. I do not get it right reliably, and I have stopped describing it as reading people, which was always a flattering word for guessing with extra steps.

He runs something considerable now. He still does not know what to do with his coat, and I have never once seen it matter.

Note: Victor Draemont is a character, and these notes are written in his voice. Nothing here is financial, investment, tax, or legal advice, and nothing here is a recommendation to buy, sell, or gamble on anything.