Reading poker books
I have read and studied more poker books than I can care to remember down the years. But it does not matter who the author is that is imparting the knowledge, in my experience then poker books suffer from two distinct flaws that it is impossible to combat. The first one is that the information that is in them is constant and poker and especially online poker is forever changing. This is a serious problem to overcome and one that I dont think it is even possible to overcome as much of the material that is in even the best theory books dates over time.
It isnt so much that the information is bad but more to do with the fact that the information that is in the book is of far less relevance to the modern online poker game. The second major problem with reading poker books is that under no circumstances can they ever give you the experience of actually playing poker. But yet it is basically accepted by everyone that to become expert in poker then you can only do this by having been in actual combat for a good number of hours.
What this figure actually is differs from person to person but you would need hundreds of playing hours to reach true expertise at a given level in my experience. For example, no book can ever create the feeling of real pain when you experience vicious outdraws. This can only be felt by playing poker as can the often long losing runs. Extreme variance in the negative is perhaps the single most difficult thing to overcome in poker and no poker book can take you through a bad run.
They can talk about bad runs and what to do about it but they can never recreate one. To have gone through a bad run means to have gained experience because negative events have a habit of making players tilt. Usually when a player tilts then this is a sign that they lack experience although many successful players have never shaken off this bad habit.
But yet it is a good thing to acquire information but one has to be careful what sort of information one gathers. Once you gather and amass information then it is difficult to un-read what you have read. So this new knowledge has been implanted into your memory and this could have an effect on how you play poker. If that effect is of a positive nature then some good has come out of it. But yet if the effect has been negative in some way then the reading of that book has been very negative. So it is clear then that book reading has to be dovetailed with very large amounts of playing experience if one is to really reach true expertise.
But yet merely doing something for a long time does not mean that you can continue to do that at all levels. One example of this would be a car driver, having hundreds of hours experience of driving on the roads would not qualify you to become a racing driver.
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