Any AI looking at the footage would face the same issue, even for a tournament as long as the Main Event.

More Than Just Cookies

Tell detection is nuanced work, and pros are dubious that a camera-based AI tool can effectively do it better than a human.

Most nonplayers’ exposure to the importance of poker tells comes from the penultimate scene in the 1998 film Rounders. Matt Damon’s character, Mike McDermott, folds a monster hand to John Malkovich’s Teddy KGB after recognizing that the gangster has him beat—and McDermott discovers this after spotting a tell based on KGB’s habit of eating Oreos at the table. It’s arguably the most memorable poker scene in movie history because it perfectly expresses the battle of wits that underlies every poker game, even though in reality it’s quite reductive.

“To reference the Rounders Oreo cookie tell, it’s a little more abstract than that,” says Shaun Deeb, a two-time winner of the WSOP Player of the Year award and one of the most recognizable players in the game. (Deeb also made a deep run in the 2026 Main Event, finishing 15th.)

“Physical tells are so much more expansive than I think the public realizes,” Deeb says. “There are leg tells, checking tells, verbal tells, breathing tells, pulse tells. There's an insane amount of tells available, and most of those can't be picked up by a camera.”

An AI can track visual and audio patterns, but it can’t deduce intention; the former is only so valuable without the latter. Even if the tool was hypothetically perfect at determining when a player was projecting confidence or weakness, that alone isn’t a road map to deciphering their actual hand.

“How strong is two pair to one player versus another player?” says Gagliano. “Maybe someone is extra confident with a hand that’s actually weak for the situation, but for some reason they think they have the best hand, so they’re really confident.

“Maybe if I was playing a casual tournament, I would think my two pair is extremely strong. But in the Main Event I'm still a little nervous, because it's a high-stakes situation. So maybe my body language is referencing the situation rather than the hand strength.”

For a broadcast entertainment tool, those flaws aren’t necessarily a deal-breaker. No one is expectin...