You should never stop learning as a poker player, but I’m convinced poker books are not the best way to do this. I can count on one hand the number of poker books that have, in my opinion, improved me as a poker player. Three of them were in my formative poker years: Harrington Volumes one and two and Phil Gordon’s Little Green Book. Recently the two that I’ve enjoyed most are Gus Hansen’s Every Hand Revealed and Tommy Angelo’s excellent Elements of Poker. Those last two are in my opinion the future of poker literature.
I’m of the belief that the traditional linear poker strategy book is as dead as the stop and go move. There are a number of reasons for this. Firstly the poker market is so saturated with material that it’s really hard to write something fresh and new these days. Secondly if you do write something ‘fresh’ the lead time in actually getting a book published means that it may be not be obsolete by the time it’s published, but it’ll certainly be less pertinent.
Poker Savvy Plus
The poker community is a lot more savvy these days, we need and expect a bit more than poker by numbers advice of the do X with X hand for X position variety. This is, in part due to the proliferation of poker strategy material available on the myriad of poker forums. Next and perhaps most crucially are the fact that there are far better mediums for improving your poker game than poker books. At the forefront of these are Poker Training sites.
Another issue is that many of those on the market are out of touch with the way the modern online game is played. To use one example, most poker books preach the standard opening raise of three times the big blind for tournaments, whereas now, at least online, the standard open is usually anywhere between 2.2x and 2.8 the big blind.
But perhaps the biggest problem with poker books is once you reach a level of semi-competence, there really is no better way to learn than playing and reviewing your hand histories. And no book can teach you how to do that, well at least not yet anyway.
So for me it is a case of goodbye traditional standard poker strategy books, hello to those that dare to do something different and offer less formulaic material.