A new startup has developed a tool which boasts that it can tell if you are a poker player, or a terrorist, by scanning your face.

It's a common trope in poker that the sharks are the people who can look at your face and tell what hand you have. Faception is trying to go one better, and claim that it can tell if you play poker, do MMA, have a high IQ, or are a terrorist, just using its facial recognition software.

While generally 'Physiognomy' has been debunked as pseudo science, according to a report in Snapmunk, new research is beginning to suggest that certain personality traits correlate with certain facial features, such as width-to-height ratios.

After the Paris attacks last year, Faception was tested and identified nine of the 11 terrorists in a sample of people from all walks of life.

25 of 27 poker players spotted

The software has also been used to identify poker players from a sample of the wider public. It identified 25 of 27 poker players in a database, as well as picking four of seven players who made it to the final table of a 50-person poker tournament.

Looking at the sample of faces in the first test, that included recognising Doyle Brunson, Greg Merson, Antonio Esfandiari, Eli Elezra, Gus Hansen and Daniel Cates.

According to the company, they "encode facial appearances in proprietary image descriptors and train state of the art machine learning algorithms to predict personal traits, capabilities and online behaviors.”

The poker players identified by the technology

They envisage the software could be used from everything from homeland security, recruitment, marketing and even artificial intelligence.

Clearly if the technology is legitimate, it could also prove highly controversial, especially if it led to pre-emptive security measures taken against people who 'look like criminals', not unlike in the movie Minority Report.

Do you believe this technology works? Let us know in the comments.

Barry Carter Barry Carter is the editor of PokerStrategy.com and the co-author of The Mental Game of Poker 1 & 2. Twitter

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