Great thanks for your opinion

It's not just knowledge - it's applying knowledge in real life scenarios against other humans which is very challenging. You don't know wtf you're talking about.

Mason are you a high level winning player? If not then how would you feel qualified to make comments like this?

Why don't you tell us what you find very challenging about it? I don't find executing plays based on my poker knowledge to be challenging at all.

The idea that you need 10,000 hours is silly. It's not an athletic sport or something like playing a musical instrument which requires thousands of hours of repetition. You're the one who doesn't know what he's talking about.

Mason

If the game was tic-tac-toe, it should take less than an hour to become top notch. But according to you, it should take 10,000 hours. The reason it doesn't is that this game is not only a knowledge game but it's very simple.

I agree that you don't learn to become a good poker player very quickly, but again, 10,000 hours is ridiculous.

Mason

Because the strategy is often outdated by the time they are published.

This certainly wasn't the case with any of our books. But I do agree that in many cases, the published strategy was better the day before it was published than the day after.

Mason

I think I'm back at poker after a hiatus. Think the most important is to be a winning player, no matter the stakes, low for me. Then you get the thrills as a bonus. I bought a lot of books I only partly read, sat with opening hand charts at the computer. Now I will play, figuring things out, ballpark math and psychology. I value the theoretical knowledge I got, but equal part is the experience: "what may this guy be playing with?" Have put in the hours to maybe have an educated guess. Books can only take you that far, may partly sadly be in the past for me, will learn mainly through playing.

When I was 12 years old I thought I understood everything.

When I was 16 I looked back at myself and saw I how wrong I was, and now I understood everything.

When I was 21 I looked back and saw how wrong I was at 16.

When I was 25 I looked back and blah, blah blah....

This is the same pattern I've had in my poker career. Point is it takes years AND experience to master things in any field. Look at doctors/surgeons. They get training for years ("book reading") but still need thousands of hours to be accomplished. Would you rather have heart surgery from a surgeon with 10,000 hrs of experience or 1,000 hrs?

10,000 hrs of poker is a reasonable approximation to attain your peak in poker skills. (I'm talking about your average person; please don't throw out your "it took ME only 2,000 and I crush").

depends on what you mean by good. You wouldnt need 10k hours to beat Alcoholic betty and tilty steve down at the 1-2 game but if you want to smack those 50knl players around you would probably need more than 10k hours of hardcore study time

A heart surgeon can not study very ineffectively or not at all, game select very easy heart surgeries, and surround themselves with other heart surgeons that validate their poor practices.

Is comparing poker skill to what is required to be a heart surgeon reasonable? I doubt it. Also, keep in mind that if a heart surgeon performs poorly, someone might die. That's not true in poker. So, the heart surgeon, to be top notch, needs to reach a higher level of perfection than a poker player needs to reach to be a successful winning player.

Mason

To a certain degree I agree with this. To be successful at poker, you don't need to be the best player in the world, and to be the best player in the world should take longer (plus a lot of natural ability) than is required to be a successful player.

But the 10,000 hour figure is again silly. I believe it's promoted by the poker mental coaches as one of the means to get customers and, most important, to keep them for a long time.

Mason

Anyhow the poker book is not dead. As Mason told, ebooks are a good option, no need to fill the shelves anymore. Got some Sit n go ones as samples, may even get the Moshman in full again, how about that? Ebooks are interesting, they are expansions of the texts you get for free online. Kind of paying for getting a bit more online content.

Anyhow playing and seeing what the players in fact do, and seeing the results of what you do, is very much the key, taking time and effort, how many thousand hours? Books are after all theoretical. Though, you can from them get lists of possibilities to choose from, that's ok and nice.

It's not that books are dead, it's that making other poker content is better. There are poker courses with more in-depth videos and other tools (solvers, charts, etc.) that can help with poker learning better than a book can. Books do have some use, but if you were advising someone who was starting to learn poker, you would probably be recommending them a course.

Learning should come from whatever source you can get.

Books can help you not go broke chasing.The single most helpful thing I ever read in a book, was maybe 50 years ago .....the likelihood against making a flush , in 7 stud, when your 4th card did not continue to build your hand.

The second most useful lesson was from experience I playing, in many weekly 40 player morning tournaments at the DI and Rio back then and seeing the same 6 or so players out of a 12 player grouping make the final table week in and week out.(Actually, one of those guys, Tex Sheehan, had also written a book.)

For me the best illustration of a pro player perspective versus a low-stakes rec player approach was a comment made to me at the Bellagio one time, by David Sklansky, that, "You know, you don't HAVE to play every hand", at a time I was up like $350 running good in a $1-2 NL game.

Fwiw, I'm very likely NOT a lifetime winning poker player, even at the lowest live cash games spread.)

You cannot use an internet page as a mousepad tho

Poker books just need to rebrand to gain a market (self help, etc.).

I would read mostly poker books in high school (yes slipped inside the open textbook) during the Moneymaker days. Learned more from those books than I did from the books behind it.

Poker strategy is constantly changing, but the way you think about strategy/logic against the world never changes. You learned how to do something, and then update your priors (I think a guy named Nate used to rant about stuff like that on here).



Postscript,
Malcom Gladwell is a fool who connects random ideas in a way that is pleasing on the eyes. His work always seemed to be correlated without any causality. You'd think he'd realize that lol

If it takes 10,000 hours to be great you would be better off spending 500 hours to be just good and the other 9500 hours trying to get into soft games.
Mariano and Gman are up 1.5 M on the hustler streams. I don't think either uses a solver.

I think people who are smart enough to use solvers and become a top player could have probably made more money if they dedicated the same energy and work ethic to other endeavors.

You see it live all the time. You see regs battling other regs (in terrible games) , convinced they have an edge against each other.

Funny visual to think about. "Sure, it looks like he's studying chemistry... but wait, there is a much thicker copy of Super System 2 'hidden' in there!"

That whole trope is sort of puzzling to me, too. I can't think of any situation in high school where I would have needed to pretend I was reading one book but actually I had another. In fact, if memory serves, it was maybe a 50/50 shot that we needed to have our textbook in class in the first place.

I mostly agree with this, except the "without any causality" part. Granted, I've only read Outliers, but if anything, he finds situations where a correlation already exists, then his book attempts to figure out the causality. And it's the latter part is where I found myself giving the occasional stinkeye.

Finally, I would pay any amount of money for people to stop crediting Gladwell for the 10,000-hour rule. It was Anders Ericsson who adopted the phrase, and in fact, he has subsequently gone back to clarify his study because Gladwell (and those who read Outliers) so badly misinterpreted the findings. Unfortunately, your average Gen-X dad who thinks his kid will play in the MLB read Gladwell but not Ericsson. As a result, little Chad or Cody or Blake required Tommy John surgery before he was old enough to drive.

I've credited Gladwell before with the 10,000 hours idea and a friend of mine has done as well and we've both agreed to stop doing so. We don't want to be overly selfish so we'll accept $5M each at your convenience, tyvm nice doing business with you

Young people don't read books. Most can't get through three pages. They watch videos.

Nice. Get the rest of the book-reading world to join you, and you're on.

Ed Miller’s The Course is worth ten times its retail price. Miller wrote the most popular column for Cardplayer for a decade until magazines went out of fashion. An M.I.T. nerd who had a makeover on Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, Miller could have earned billions as a quant on Wall Street but loved playing low-limit cash hold ‘em. The course brings his two decades of pro poker up to date for the today’s most popular game, low stakes no limit hold ‘em, focusing not just on ranges but the fundamental weakness of the rec players: they play too many hands. He details how to identify and exploit players who fold too much against aggression, call too much with worse, or bluff their bad hands to get rid of them.

When I went to Vegas, I asked dealers if they knew where Ed was playing so he could sign my copy of his book. Ed, if you are out there, send me a message! I’m among your biggest fans.