Reading Poker Books

I’m not one of those who subscribe to the belief that reading a vast array of poker books is worthwhile because they all of something good in them and you can separate the bad content from the good content. If you can do that easily you may not have needed to read the book in the first place and putting one erroneous, bad concept from a book into place can be expensive. Hopefully I’m beyond the point where this can happen to me but maybe not. This leaves me in the position of having to either know quite a bit about the author in order to read the book: buy the book based on a review by an authority who I know to be knowledgeable and I respect; or buy the book because I want to write a review of it myself (which I have no interest in doing). Perhaps I’m limiting myself but so far I’m happy with the results.

I would add three more reasons to read a poker book even if you think that it is not going to help your game:


1. It allows you to understand the ideas of others (even if you don't agree with them). For example, if I know that a player in my game considers Cloutier's hold 'em book as the leading authority, it will help me to read the book and figure out how this player may approach a situation.


2. Pure entertainment


3. You loan the book to several of your usual opponents and tell them how great it is /images/smile.gif