[Peter McDermott]

[ QUOTE ]
If you are familiar with it, maybe you know what a PODxt is? (A guitar amp simulator.) Thier manuals and literature make it sound like the sound of all the classic rock tunes are built right in. The reality is something quite different, as some 120,000 post on one bulletin board alone testify.


[/ QUOTE ]

If someone expects an amp simulator to be actually playing the tunes for them, then it's no wonder that they're disappointed. They're clearly expecting it to do something that it isn't designed to do.

In order to get the tunes out of it, you've also got to put in the hard work of actually learning to be a competent player as well. And even this will only give you satisfactory results. It's still not going to make a basic competent player into Jimi Hendrix.

Surely poker and poker literature are pretty similar? In order to become competent, you've first got to learn and understand the various concepts involved. This is *all* that the books can teach you.

To be successful, you then have to have the discipline to be able to apply them at the right time. You also need the intelligence and the experience to be able to balance competing concepts and figure out which one is best to apply in any particular situation. Study can assist you in the process of moving you in that particular direction, but the books alone can't actually do it for you.

I wish that it could. I'm a quick student myself, but I don't always have the discipline to do what the theory tells me is the correct move, and I certainly don't have the experience necessary to assist me in choosing between two competing concepts most of the time.

So I just work on continuously improving my game, one concept at a time. And I'm definitely improving, which is all I can really hope for.

On a related note, I've noticed that everyone always seems to recommend SSHE to beginning players, but when I very first started playing, I think that there were just too many concepts in a book like SSHE. (OK, so I started with Jones' LLHE, but the same principle applies.)

However, when I picked up Sklansky's first book, Hold 'Em Poker, there was just enough information in there for me to be able to hold most of it in my head most of the time. Because I wasn't trying to balance too many concepts simultaneously, I was finally able to pay enough attention to the very basic things that I really needed to master before moving on -- things like starting hands, position, reading opponents hands, etc.

I guess I'm saying that poker is a lot like being a musician. You really need to master the basic things like scales and chords, before you can move on to being any kind of virtuoso.