[Blarg]

Book-based learning can be a direct substitution for experience. It can substitute someone else's experience - a huge amount of it, plus their careful thought about their experience -- for one's own. A book can be a free ride that way.

The 2+2 books and some other books I've read can shorten everyone's learning curve enormously for just 25 bucks a pop or so.

I was up from a $200 bankroll at the 7-stud live tables in Commerce and the Bicycle Club in Los Angeles to the 10/20 in just a couple of months, and got to the 15/30 not too long after. That was only possible because of the experience of Chip Reese, Ray Zee, Mason and David Sklansky. They didn't make me great, but I could have lived a lifetime without stumbling across the concepts they got across, or figuring out exactly how to apply them and how seriously to take them.

I think experience can be an astoundingly minor factor. For 25 bucks, you can just buy a book and profit off someone else's experience.

Of course, for some people experience will much more critical, because they won't be readers, or maybe they don't have access to good books in their language.

I'd drop experience way down, and keep discipline at the top.

It is a kind of over-arching virtue that controls whether other virtues even come into play. It's very different from many other abilities, in that even very stupid people with perhaps little to recommend them sometimes have enormous amounts of it, and the most brilliant, beloved and admired people sometimes have almost none.

Discipline says whether or not you pay attention every hand during a session or just go numb after a while and play mechanically; whether you tilt and how badly, and how quickly you recover from it; whether you have the patience to sit through readings and re-readings of books and learn the numbers; whether you have the present-mindedness to remember to bring in all the mathematical and other ideas even under stress or when thrown off your usual track by self-doubt; etc. And it takes discipline to walk away when you know you're not playing your best game and will likely just make things worse if you continue playing. It takes discipline to keep your ego in line and not be crushed by defeats or made stupid by victories. You can have all the abilities and virtues in the world, but it takes discipline to apply them and keep applying them. And to admit it to yourself when your discipline has slipped and you're screwing up.

I've seen quite a few bright, capable poker players without the discipline to consistently win. Sometimes you feel almost obligated to call those guys with nothing just so they go on tilt.