Joe Navarro has a skill that all poker players wish they possessed, a talent that is so powerful that the federal government had him on its payroll for more than a quarter of a century. Navarro knows how to look at someone and figure out if the person's lying or not. He's able to spot what most of us would interpret as a minute hand motion, and understand what it means with an accuracy rivaled not even by machines. One Sunday toward the end of November, more than 100 people packed into a conference room at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas to hear what the expert in nonverbal communication had to say about poker tells.

Foxwoods Resort Casino loves to set records: world's largest casino; biggest poker room on the U.S. East Coast; and, in 2005, its World Poker Finals established two World Poker Tour milestones, first by crowning the youngest event champion in WPT history, a then 21-year-old Nick Schulman, and by paying out $2,167,500 - the largest first-place cash prize in a WPT regular-season event.

Anthropologists such as Stewart Culin have traced the lineage of playing cards back to Korean divinatory arrows. Fired into the air by a shaman, these shafts of bamboo fletched with cock feathers literally and theologically pointed the way - to where game would be grazing or an enemy would attack from, or to choose the best young soldier to receive the hand of the warlord's daughter in marriage.

The 2006 Tournament of Champions (TOC) was aired on ESPN recently, and undoubtedly will be repeated quite a bit on the ESPN family of networks over the next few months. After all, Mike "The Mouth" Matusow, Daniel "Kid Poker" Negreanu, and World Poker Tour (WPT) announcer and pro poker player Mike Sexton were the final three players left standing - and all are big names in the poker world.

Before flying out to Foxwoods, I was really excited about playing in the tournament for several reasons. It had been a while since playing at Niagara Falls, and I was itching to play. Also, Foxwoods has always been one of my favorite stops on the World Poker Tour. In fact, a while back, I wrote a column about Foxwoods; I called it a "hidden gem," and I still believe that. However, a few things bothered me about this particular trip that I'll get to later.

Last January, I traveled down to Tunica, Mississippi, to play in both a World Poker Tour event at the Gold Strike Casino Resort and a World Series of Poker Tournament Circuit event at the Grand Casino. I was unfortunate enough to finish five and eight places out of the money, respectively, in those events.

Great players read hands. They read situations and apply nonstandard strategies to win extra bets and pots - which those who use only conventional-wisdom strategies don't win. Of course, that is much easier said than done. It obviously requires that a player not only know the nonstandard strategies, but also be able to read his opponents with accuracy.

The Problem: Tournament directors and organizers have started a trend toward bigger starting stacks, smaller starting blinds, and more playing hours. This is exactly the wrong approach. Tournament directors take note: You are making the players play more, but you are not giving them more play. If you really want to add more play to tournaments, eliminate players quickly until the money is reached, and then slow down.

I recently received an e-mail from one of my faithful readers, who had this to say: "Dear Tom, I am a big fan of your column and have been reading it for at least 10 years. It is only recently that I have started to play hold'em, because I really prefer other forms of poker. However, since hold'em, especially no-limit style, is so popular these days, I thought I would give it a try.