Miha Travnik has won the 2011 World Poker Tour Slovenia. The Slovenian homeboy earned €84,500 for outlasting 140 opponents who took to the felt at Grand Casino Portoroz, but the 20-year-old was reportedly so overwhelmed by triumphing at his first major live tournament that he avoided the post-event media scrum by calling his mother to come pick him up and take him home. Italy’s Vincenzo Natale was the runner-up, earning €70,700, while Sweden’s Johanne Korsar took home €48,500 for placing third.
It’s likely that Travnik employed the occasional bluff along his road to victory, but he might not have been able to fool the boffins at Buffalo University. According to a study published in the Journal of Nonverbal Behavior (seriously, is there a Journal of Verbal Behavior?), while accomplished liars can do a pretty good at masking their facial responses (“expression suppression”) while telling a whopper, frame-by-frame analysis of facial movement proved that they can’t do it completely, and they can’t do it always. Despite this, the majority of the 60 volunteer fibbers in the study believed they had successfully masked all signs of their deceitful ways. Or so they claimed…