There has been somewhat of a technological revolution with regards to poker over the past few years. The Internet has paved the way for the online poker game to really take off and this has led to vast numbers of young kids coming into the game and taking poker very seriously. Now most of these young guys are not just any old young guys but players who are University educated and have thought processes, intelligence and learning techniques that are highly relevant to the analysis of poker.
Many of them also have advanced qualifications in mathematics and statistics. Years ago, the people with these types of credentials didn’t come into poker because it wasn’t main stream and the Internet wasn’t widely spread and neither was poker. But now it is and these young guns are analysing the game in whole new ways that the old guard simply didn’t. So they understand the game better in many ways and have certainly enlightened the knowledge base of many of the older players.
So where does all this leave the older poker books? Well I would not go as far as to call them useless as a way to learn poker because I have over a hundred in my library. For instance I rate the Harrington series very highly. There are some books that are classics and will remain so. But I think that the overwhelming majority of them can be used as nothing more than primers for novice players in this new age of poker that we are living in.
I think that it can certainly be detrimental to the education of a poker player these days to concentrate on poker books as their soul source of education. Although it has to be said that this is sort of dependent on what level you are trying to beat. At something like NL50 ring games for instance then there is still enough value for good players to be able to beat these games with a good solid game behind them after having read the Harrington cash game series for example.
But you really need to avail yourself these days of the many good technically aware young poker coaches that are sprouting up all over the Internet on online coaching sites. There are many respectable sites like Card Runners, Stox Poker and Leggo Poker to name but a few. These sites are teaching their players the primary way to learn poker in the 21st century.
Unfortunately this means that the older players are getting left behind and until recently this certainly meant me as well. I was forced to undergo a rapid re-education and was forced to re-evaluate everything that I previously knew about poker.
This meant undoing previously learnt knowledge which was proving to be a hindrance to my future progression as a player and my ability to be able to continue to make money playing online poker. So my advice would be to be wary of getting your education from poker books in the modern world of online poker and especially the older books.
Carl “The Dean” Sampson