The World’s Hardest Bluffing Sport
By 4 a.m., a breeze had begun to blow throughout the stadium close to the middle of Baghdad, however Qaid al-Sheikhli was nonetheless sweating via his dishdasha. He was six hours right into a championship quarterfinals match of mheibes, one of many world’s most difficult psychological sports activities. His staff, al-Sa’doun, was down by 10 factors. The clock was operating out.
If you hear the sport described, mheibes doesn’t sound tough. It sounds unattainable. Assembled on the court docket in entrance of al-Sheikhli have been his opponents: 45 males from the town of Najaf, organized in three neat rows. One in all these gamers held a silver ring. It was al-Sheikhli’s job to find out which one—and through which fist he held the ring—judging solely by his facial cues and different tells.
Al-Sheikhli had already made important progress towards this objective: He and his fellow captain had narrowed the sector of suspects to 4. A referee in a crimson vest hovered close by with a stopwatch. Every staff began with simply 5 minutes to search out the ring, per that yr’s match guidelines; if that point elapsed, their opponents bought the purpose.
Now al-Sheikhli bore down on one of many remaining defenders, a middle-aged man in a light-blue gown. “Fists and face!” he barked in Baghdadi-accented Arabic. The Najaf participant stretched out his arms, fists nonetheless clenched, and lifted his head to look into the captain’s eyes. He held this pose for 3 seconds, as required by the match’s guidelines, whereas al-Sheikhli scanned his face. “Taliq! ” the captain cried, whereas slapping on the man’s two palms in fast succession. He thought the fists have been empty, and he was proper. When the person uncovered his palms, al-Sa’doun followers within the bleachers rose to their toes, roaring in approval.
By narrowing the sector to a few males, al-Sheikhli had earned his staff a little bit of bonus time—two additional minutes on the clock. He huddled together with his fellow captain. In a number of earlier rounds, they’d managed to determine Najaf’s ring bearer, however had picked the fallacious hand and misplaced the purpose. “It was the Najaf fists,” al-Sheikhli informed me later. “They have been tough.”
When the captains broke their huddle, al-Sheikhli referred to as to the group, his arms outstretched. The al-Sa’doun followers answered with one other cheer. Now he turned on one of many three remaining suspects, a younger man with shaggy hair and his jacket pulled up round his neck—a typical transfer to cover the pulsing of the carotid artery. Al-Sheikhli referred to as for “fists and face” once more, and the referee pulled again the person’s hair in order that his face was absolutely seen. For the complete three seconds, the captain stared him down. Lastly, he gestured to the person’s proper hand. “Jiib,” he mentioned. Give it to me. The person opened his hand, and the stadium lights mirrored, finally, on a glint of silver.
Mendacity is a elementary human act, and bluffing video games of 1 kind or one other are present in cultures across the globe. Latvian youngsters play a ring-hiding recreation of their very own, and “hunt the slipper” was a well-liked hiding-and-bluffing recreation in Victorian parlors. Throughout North America, Indigenous teams take pleasure in a sport not in contrast to mheibes, through which gamers should discover bones hidden within the fists of an opposing staff.
The nice U.S. contribution to bluffing video games, in fact, is poker, now a world business price roughly $100 billion. I coated poker for a couple of decade, and I’ve met among the recreation’s virtuosos within the artwork of recognizing tells. Even so, after I first realized about mheibes, and began poring over the match movies posted on YouTube and Fb, I used to be awestruck by the captains’ talent. A poker participant would possibly want to review eight different individuals at their desk. A mheibes captain takes inventory of maybe 45 distinct opponents—or, actually, 90 completely different fists. Mheibes captains don’t succeed at this process each time. However I got here to grasp that prime gamers spot the ring with surprising regularity.
I needed to see this for myself. Final yr, I went to Baghdad, the place the sport is alleged to have been invented, and the place it’s performed, by custom, on nights in the course of the holy month of Ramadan, after the breaking of the quick. The small print of its origins stay unclear: Some say it began within the 1500s, in the course of the Ottoman period; others hint it again to the Abbasid caliphate many centuries earlier.
Mheibes-league officers informed me the fashionable guidelines started to take form in the course of the Nineteen Nineties, underneath the regime of Saddam Hussein, who made the sport a logo of the nation. The sport endured even after Hussein was toppled (due partly to his personal failed try at bluffing). Since then, the variety of groups competing has grown greater than tenfold, and arranged tournaments, as soon as confined to Baghdad, now pop up from Basra, within the south, to Erbil, within the north. Final yr, in a groundbreaking transfer, the Baghdadi Museum hosted a public mheibes recreation for girls.
My seat for the April 2024 match between al-Sa’doun and Najaf was by the decide’s desk. Sitting to my proper was Jassem al-Aswad—the decide himself, a grand determine in a inexperienced dishdasha. Al-Aswad is the best mheibes participant in residing reminiscence, and his fame amongst Iraqis extends past the sport. In 2008, when the nation was mired in sectarian violence, he marched a staff onto the Bridge of the Imams, which connects a neighborhood that incorporates a holy Shiite shrine to a Sunni stronghold throughout the Tigris. The span had been the positioning of one of many Iraq Struggle’s best civilian calamities, and had solely simply reopened. One evening, al-Aswad introduced out gamers from each side of the river, who met up within the center to play for peace.
Al-Aswad, now in his early 70s, appeared to take pleasure in his new position on the sidelines. He took evident pleasure in shouting to the followers, and enjoying with the youngsters who ran as much as him with their fists closed, hoping to idiot the good man. He additionally kibitzed together with his outdated pal Ali al-Lami, the octogenarian retired captain of the al-Habibiya staff, who sat close by. We watched collectively because the groups from al‑Sa’doun and Najaf launched into the subsequent spherical of their match. It was after 5 a.m. Now al-Sa’doun would conceal the ring.
Supporters introduced out a stretch of gold-fringed material to obscure the staff’s alternative of ring holder. In mheibes, defensive technique is simply as essential as offense, and the position of the ring unfolds with Masonic complexity. A staff captain would possibly put his palms over every participant’s fists in flip, both inserting a hoop inside of 1 or pretending to. (If gamers know which teammate has the ring, they could betray that information on the court docket.) Typically a captain locations additional rings and steps again to scan his teammates’ faces. Have the lads with rings begun to sweat? Are their fists uneven? Utilizing all of this data, a captain makes a second move, and maybe a 3rd, till he has eliminated all of the rings however one.
When al-Sa’doun had completed and the gamers settled of their rows, the Najaf captains stepped onto the court docket. As they made their rounds among the many rows of al-Sa’doun males, al‑Lami leaned throughout me. “Jassem,” he mentioned to al-Aswad. “Second row. Within the inexperienced, close to the top. Eh? It’s him. Solely I can’t inform which fist.”
“Proper fist,” al-Aswad replied. “I’ve performed that man earlier than.”
We have been no less than 20 toes away from the closest participant, and the person they have been speaking about was possibly one other 30 toes from there. I squinted on the man they’d recognized. My eyes, youthful by a long time than both al-Lami’s or al-Aswad’s, couldn’t make a lot out. Neither may Najaf’s star captain. When he stopped in entrance of the person in inexperienced to review his fists and face, he gave no signal of seeing something uncommon.
A minute or two later, the Najaf captains started eliminating gamers. They counted out a number of within the second row. However earlier than they might proceed, a kind of dismissed cried out “Baat!,” which meant he had the ring. It was the person within the inexperienced dishdasha—the one al-Lami and al-Aswad had pegged from about 50 toes away. And simply as al-Aswad had predicted, the ring was in his proper fist.
A mheibes captain’s expertise can appear miraculous, and even suspect to the non-Iraqi viewer. But when mheibes have been a sham—if its matches have been scripted upfront, like some form of Iraqi WrestleMania—then the personal dialog I’d simply noticed must have been prewritten too. Mheibes suggests a extra compelling chance, which is that the artwork of peering into individuals’s faces and uncovering deceit could also be honed to astonishing precision.
Some researchers imagine that individuals could be prodigies at lie detection. Different students aren’t positive these so-called wizards are actual. Mark Frank, a communication professor at SUNY Buffalo, is within the former camp, and helped create among the most bold lie-detection research thus far. However after I confirmed him some clips of mheibes captains’ feats, even he was greatly surprised. Frank puzzled on the circumstances that had led them to develop such extraordinary talent. A curious sample had emerged from the early work on wizards, he informed me: A lot of them had skilled a tumultuous childhood. Some have been the kids of alcoholics. Later analysis discovered wizards who have been raised in establishments or in violent environments. Students theorized that for these individuals particularly, the power to learn adults’ expressions once they have been younger may need been lifesaving. (This made me consider Jerry Yang, one among poker’s face-reading masters—and an ethnic Hmong who grew up, for a time, in a Thai refugee camp.)
The previous two generations in Iraq have endured an nearly unthinkable development of wars, mass migrations, and humanitarian crises. Even within the relative calm of current years, bombings nonetheless happen with regularity. “That,” Frank informed me, “is an atmosphere ripe for producing people who find themselves good detectors of refined clues.”
Once I bought the possibility to drift this idea to precise mheibes gamers, they have been unimpressed. Mheibes has been round for longer than the current conflicts, al-Sheikhli, al-Sa’doun’s co-captain, informed me. And one technology of recent gamers grew up within the Seventies, when Baghdad was a largely peaceable, modernizing oasis.
“I grew up watching different captains. I performed lots. That’s how I realized,” al-Sheikhli mentioned. He grabbed a hoop for demonstration and closed his fist round it. Then he pointed to a spot between his second and third knuckle. There’s a tendon there that fastens the dorsal interossei muscle to bone. It’s nearly invisible. However al-Sheikhli mentioned it typically bulges out a tiny bit when somebody has the ring, and captains study to identify it solely via in depth follow. (His willingness to share this tip shocked me. Over months of interviews, I’d realized that almost all mheibes gamers received’t talk about their methods in any respect.)
However even a captain’s favored strategies might lose efficacy as a match wears on. Ali al-Lami warned me that mheibes modifications after dawn. Discovering the ring can get tougher, he mentioned. Whether or not from the return of fasting or sheer exhaustion, gamers might grow to be emotionless. The captains, too, might begin to wilt. One viral video on TikTok reveals a captain towards the top of a 15-hour match, probing his opponents within the daytime warmth, as run-down as a senator within the closing moments of a filibuster.
The quarterfinals match I noticed completed shortly after 9 a.m., when Najaf scored its thirteenth level and received the sport. Followers streamed to the exits, meals stalls closed, gamers boarded buses. Finally, a number of males came visiting to the place I used to be sitting, picked up the decide’s desk, and walked it again into the small stadium workplace the place it’s saved. If this had been a neighborhood recreation, the winners would have acquired, by custom, a plate of sweets. Within the mheibes main leagues, nevertheless, no such prize is obtainable. For as soon as, all the Najaf gamers have been empty-handed.
This text seems within the July 2025 print version with the headline “The World’s Hardest Bluffing Sport.”
