Yeah, this. It's important to see the 10k hours idea as a prerequisite (though it's not always true, you can get there shorter), but that doesn't mean that putting in 10k hours of study, let alone 10k hours of play, will make you even a winning player, let alone a crusher. It's got to be smart study combined with smart practice. That's not to say you won't learn important stuff in that 10k hours, and there will be some naturally talented folk who don't need to study hard and will just drink in the strategy lessons they learnt while playing and intuit the rest, but that's gotta be < 0.1% of the population.

Books are finished thoughts frozen in time while poker is an evolving game.
I'd say books are good for the general concepts and formulas (EV, explaining goal and nature of GTO, pot odds etc..) but when you play , there is a big part of the game (population tendencies) that changes constantly and need updating.
/ramblings

Ten thousand hours I'm so damn close I can taste it
On some Malcolm Gladwell, David-Bowie-meets-Kanye ****
This is dedication
A life lived for art is never a life wasted
Ten thousand

Ten thousand hours felt like ten thousand hands
Ten thousand hands, they carry me
Ten thousand hours felt like ten thousand hands
Ten thousand hands, they carry me

If you want to be one of the top players in the world, then lots of study, plus plenty of experience, is what you'll need to do. But to become a successful winning player, the idea that you need thousands and thousands of hours, which you would in an athletic sport, is not necessary, and the claims that this is what you need are silly.

Mason

You really are way off base. Why don't you consider the merit, or lack of it, in what I say than the personal attacks.

As an aside. I've played tennis since I was a kid, and I did, for instance, spend thousands of hours just hitting backhands against a wall and against a ball machine, to get moderately good. You don't need to do anything like this in poker, and that's because the execution component in poker is small compared to the knowledge component.

Mason

By "execution component", are you talking about the physical act of looking at your cards, looking at the board, counting out a bet from your stack, putting said bet into the middle, etc?

So here's what we'll do. On Tuesday June 20 and Wednesday June 21, you can get a free kindle of my book Real Poker Psychology - Expanded Edition. On one of those days just go here:

https://www.amazon.com/Real-Poker-Ps...%2C141&sr=1-12

and you'll be able to download the kindle of this book for a price of $0.00. If you don't have the kindle app you can get it for free from Amazon.

Mason

PS: I am the editor and have been the 2+2 editor for many years.

That book sucked when it was written and it's useless now.

^^^ Can you elaborate? I just picked it up at a discount from Amazon, haven't started reading it yet though.

That's very kind of you but I don't do kindle and I don't take psychology advice from someone who doesn't understand basic ideas about fight or flight and habitually pops up in threads to rubbish what other people have said before trying to sell his own product and thinks tilt runs down the same pathway as humour. It's not personal, Mason. I'm sure you're a standup guy irl and we could possibly learn a lot from each other over a beer. But my bookcase is sagging under the load of the books I've bought that I want to read, so although the idea of reading your book and trying to peer review it, something I'm totally sure you'd appreciate, is marginally appealing to me, I'll stick to the books I will enjoy reading.

BTW the title of that thread made me first think you were giving away actual Kindles.

Giving it a read right now, ignore these miserable social rejects brother


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

A smart person who has reasonable impulse control and doesn't totally wear his cards on his face can easily become a good player in far fewer than 10000 hours, and the hours that are spent can be used most effectively by doing more studying than playing.

I initially learned more about poker from books than from any other source, and I'm sure I was a winning player the first day I played in a casino. Just knowing a reasonable starting hand range and which boards were good for my hand, and playing based on this, made me one of the best players at the table (1/2 LHE, the smallest game in Atlantic City casinos at the time). There wasn't a single other player at that first table who wasn't playing extremely loose, and that hurt them so much that someone like me could memorize a starting hand chart and already be a favorite in the game.

Of course, almost 20 years later, I have played over 10000 hours, and I am likely the best player at my game in any small casino where I play. I certainly have learned lots of nuance that couldn't be learned from a book, but I still enjoy reading my old poker books occasionally to refresh my memory, and I still read lots of poker strategy articles, posts on 2+2, etc.

Exactly. You can get a solid base from poker books (along with live play practice) and it'll be far less than 10k hours from when you're a profitable low stakes live player.

BTW, anyone who is serious about poker, no matter what game they play and how good they already are, should definitely read Sklansky's Theory Of Poker. And if you have already read it years ago, you should read it again

Despite having very little specific strategy discussion, it is by far the best and most important book ever written about poker, and it likely will never be surpassed.

It has you playing way too tight and not really fighting for pots.

Hwang used to play at Aria a lot 5-6 years ago. I'm sure he won small in those games but he wasn't anywhere close to the best player in those games and was in no way a player I worried about.

Seemed like a nice guy though.

His book has held up remarkably well - I reread it during the height of covid having first read it around 2005.

The lack of specific strategy discussion is probably why it has held up the way it has.

I hope you don't take offense, but I'm just trying to clarify: you're talking about his follow-up book, written in 2009, right? Because his first book, "PLO: The Big Play Strategy" sounds to me like what you are describing. I'll agree that anyone trying to follow that book has little to no chance of being even a moderate winner today.

the execution component of poker is massive imo, there's a reason there are so many books courses etc. on mental game, being a tilt monkey is a huge barrier to getting to high stakes

Im currently reading "Winning in Tough Hold 'em Games: Short-Handed and High-Stakes Concepts and Theory for Limit Hold 'em"

Really enjoying it for my LHE game...still holds up for the $1/$2 games online

No offense taken.

I only read his first one.

If you had read "Purposeful Practice for Poker: The Modern Approach to Studying Poker" by Gareth James (2019), you would know that 10,000 hours alone don't get you to improve enough.

Sure, but you can't learn how to play poker from Instagram!

Thank you for that, my Kindle is too old but I would like to have a look at the book. Is it better than Jarret Tandler's "Mental Game of Poker"? That book is legendary, although I noticed it has missed concepts such as feeling "scared money".

I have "Applications of No Lmiit Hold'em". I never thought it would be good. I realize now it may be better than I considered. Now you asked, I discovered Janda has also written "No-Limit Hold 'em For Advanced Players - Tough Games" (2017), which I wasn't aware of. I am looking to get that too and have a look.

Thanks, Mason!

Most people who want to learn poker are young and have very short attention spans. Often they are suffering from what amounts to brain damage from their smartphone addictions. They are incapable of studying books and effectively absorbing their content.

Hence, there is little or no market for poker books.