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 workforce, al-Sa’doun, was down by 10 factors. The clock was working out.
Once you hear the sport described, mheibes doesn’t sound troublesome. It sounds not possible. Assembled on the courtroom in entrance of al-Sheikhli had been his opponents: 45 males from town of Najaf, organized in three neat rows. One among these gamers held a silver ring. It was al-Sheikhli’s job to find out which one—and wherein fist he held the ring—judging solely by his facial cues and different tells.
Al-Sheikhli had already made vital progress towards this objective: He and his fellow captain had narrowed the sector of suspects to 4. A referee in a purple vest hovered close by with a stopwatch. Every workforce began with simply 5 minutes to search out the ring, per that 12 months’s match guidelines; if that point elapsed, their opponents acquired 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 had been empty, and he was proper. When the person uncovered his palms, al-Sa’doun followers within the bleachers rose to their ft, roaring in approval.
By narrowing the sector to a few males, al-Sheikhli had earned his workforce a little bit of bonus time—two further minutes on the clock. He huddled along 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 advised me later. “They had been troublesome.”
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 total 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, ultimately, on a glint of silver.
Mendacity is a basic human act, and bluffing video games of 1 type or one other are present in cultures across the globe. Latvian youngsters play a ring-hiding sport of their very own, and “hunt the slipper” was a preferred hiding-and-bluffing sport in Victorian parlors. Throughout North America, Indigenous teams take pleasure in a sport not not like mheibes, wherein gamers should discover bones hidden within the fists of an opposing workforce.
The good U.S. contribution to bluffing video games, after all, is poker, now a worldwide trade price roughly $100 billion. I lined poker for a few decade, and I’ve met a few of the sport’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’ ability. A poker participant may want to check eight different individuals at their desk. A mheibes captain takes inventory of maybe 45 distinct opponents—or, actually, 90 totally different fists. Mheibes captains don’t succeed at this job each time. However I got here to grasp that high gamers spot the ring with stunning regularity.
I needed to see this for myself. Final 12 months, I went to Baghdad, the place the sport is claimed to have been invented, and the place it’s performed, by custom, on nights throughout 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, throughout the Ottoman period; others hint it again to the Abbasid caliphate many centuries earlier.
Mheibes-league officers advised me the trendy guidelines started to take form throughout the Nineties, below the regime of Saddam Hussein, who made the sport an emblem 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 12 months, in a groundbreaking transfer, the Baghdadi Museum hosted a public mheibes sport for ladies.
My seat for the April 2024 match between al-Sa’doun and Najaf was by the choose’s desk. Sitting to my proper was Jassem al-Aswad—the choose himself, a grand determine in a inexperienced dishdasha. Al-Aswad is the best mheibes participant in dwelling reminiscence, and his fame amongst Iraqis extends past the sport. In 2008, when the nation was mired in sectarian violence, he marched a workforce 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 Battle’s best civilian calamities, and had solely simply reopened. One evening, al-Aswad introduced out gamers from either 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 taking part in with the youngsters who ran as much as him with their fists closed, hoping to idiot the good man. He additionally kibitzed along with his previous good friend Ali al-Lami, the octogenarian retired captain of the al-Habibiya workforce, 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 cover the ring.
Supporters introduced out a stretch of gold-fringed cloth to obscure the workforce’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 workforce captain may 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 data on the courtroom.) Typically a captain locations further rings and steps again to scan his teammates’ faces. Have the boys with rings begun to sweat? Are their fists uneven? Utilizing all of this data, a captain makes a second go, 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 courtroom. 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 had been at the least 20 ft away from the closest participant, and the person they had been speaking about was perhaps one other 30 ft 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 might Najaf’s star captain. When he stopped in entrance of the person in inexperienced to check 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 may 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 ft 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 had been a sham—if its matches had been scripted prematurely, like some type of Iraqi WrestleMania—then the personal dialog I’d simply noticed must have been prewritten too. Mheibes suggests a extra compelling risk, which is that the artwork of peering into individuals’s faces and uncovering deceit could also be honed to astonishing precision.
Some researchers consider that folks might be prodigies at lie detection. Different students aren’t certain these so-called wizards are actual. Mark Frank, a communication professor at SUNY Buffalo, is within the former camp, and helped create a few of the most formidable lie-detection research so far. However after I confirmed him some clips of mheibes captains’ feats, even he was stunned. Frank puzzled on the circumstances that had led them to develop such extraordinary ability. A curious sample had emerged from the early work on wizards, he advised me: A lot of them had skilled a tumultuous childhood. Some had been the youngsters of alcoholics. Later analysis discovered wizards who had been raised in establishments or in violent environments. Students theorized that for these individuals particularly, the flexibility to learn adults’ expressions once they had been younger might 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 latest years, bombings nonetheless happen with regularity. “That,” Frank advised me, “is an setting ripe for producing people who find themselves good detectors of refined clues.”
Once I acquired the possibility to drift this idea to precise mheibes gamers, they had been unimpressed. Mheibes has been round for longer than the latest conflicts, al-Sheikhli, al-Sa’doun’s co-captain, advised me. And one technology of contemporary gamers grew up within the Seventies, when Baghdad was a largely peaceable, modernizing oasis.
“I grew up watching different captains. I performed loads. 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 be taught to identify it solely via intensive observe. (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 harder, he mentioned. Whether or not from the return of fasting or sheer exhaustion, gamers might turn out to be emotionless. The captains, too, might begin to wilt. One viral video on TikTok exhibits 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. Ultimately, a number of males came visiting to the place I used to be sitting, picked up the choose’s desk, and walked it again into the small stadium workplace the place it’s saved. If this had been a neighborhood sport, the winners would have acquired, by custom, a plate of sweets. Within the mheibes main leagues, nonetheless, no such prize is obtainable. For as soon as, the entire Najaf gamers had been empty-handed.
This text seems within the July 2025 print version with the headline “The World’s Hardest Bluffing Recreation.”
