Quote:
Originally Posted by MikeStarr
This entire post agrees with me. Ive yet to meet a very good player who learned to play by reading poker books. Maybe you are the one exception, but we havent met.
Most people read poker books as a quick way to get good at poker. As you say, they either misapply everything, try to skim thru it, cant remember what they read, dont understand what they read or whatever.
The only real way to get good at poker is trial and error. Poker books also have no way of teaching you how to read people. That's half the battle in NL.
Hmm...fair points on first two paragraphs. For most people book learning is not going to be hugely effective without a coach. I imagine it's like taking said abstract algebra course and not going to class, just trying to learn everything from the book. I am capable of doing this and actually skipped most of my classes, but in retrospect I don't think anyone else who skipped had solid grades in these courses.
I do think poker is teachable though, just like abstract algebra is teachable. But handing the textbook to a student and saying "The final exam is in three months, good luck" is obviously not going to work for most people. Poker is not as complicated, but it is still too complicated for most to learn it just reading. If Ed Miller (or any decent teacher) organized a class and used his books as the textbooks, I think you could turn a lot of losing players into winning ones.
Books can and do teach how to read people. Zach Elwood's books on poker tells were hugely useful to me in exactly this. Some people intuit better than others and that can't be taught, but pattern recognition can.
Trial and error I don't think is going to work for most people either who didn't have the opportunity to play millions of hands online. It takes a lifetime of playing poker to really learn it (with a straight trial and error approach). If you start from scratch, knowing nothing but the rules of the game, and just try various strategies and then adjust based on results, it simply won't work because it takes 2k+ hours to figure out if an approach is working, possibly many more depending on one's standard deviation. And after 2k hours if you see you're break even or losing, how on earth do you know what to change about your play from a trial and error standpoint?
Unless you just happen to run good when trying good strategies and run bad when trying bad ones, I don't see how a straight empirical approach is possible. Mike, surely someone or something taught you about poker at some point. You didn't just wander into a cardroom and start trying random strategies until you were winning, surely?
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OP I would suggest Ed Miller's "The Course" "Playing the Player" and "How to Read Hands at NLHE" as being more instructive and applicable to LLSNL. "Poker's 1%" is an intro to GTO concepts that is meant to be a bridge before reading more difficult and mathematical GTO books like Will Tiptons heads up series.
Last edited by Shai Hulud; 11-11-2018 at 11:17 PM.