Poker Books

I own several books about poker rules, poker strategy, poker tells, and other poker concepts. Without mentioning any specifics, most of them are only moderately useful. All of them do an extremely good job of explaining poker basics. As these works delve further into advanced poker concepts, however, I begin to wonder just how much value there is to the idea that advanced poker is somehow formulaic.

I used to sit in poker games all the time and try to remember what 'the book' said to do in certain situations. Truth be told, in most situations, the correct action to take depends minimally on the cards you hold and more directly on the myriad of circumstances involving you and your opponent. Am I hungry, tired, angry, happy, confident? I sometimes have trouble determining these tells from myself, much less my opponents!

Don't misunderstand, I think there are professional poker players that have a ridiculously accurate sense for the holdings of other players. In most of these cases, I believe that they have gained this ability not through an extraordinary inclination toward mathematics, but rather an innate sense for intuitively and quickly understanding the personalities of others. It is these people who I think are the best poker players.

By a long shot, the best poker book I have read to date is The Tao of Poker by Larry W. Phillips. If you are looking for a book that will give you a formula of how you should respond when an agressive opponent bets into your outside straight draw on the turn, then this book is not for you.

The Tao of Poker walks the reader through 285 high-level real life-inspired concepts that will improve your poker game. I sincerely feel that anyone who puts all of the concepts found in this book into practice will be a successful card player; in tournaments, cash, limit, no-limit, pot-limit, or whatever. The tips are universal. Here are a few that I like:

Rule 228: Don't tie yourself up in knots trying to make something happen when it clearly is not happening!

Rule 240: Never drop "I'm being outplayed" from your list of reasons why you may be losing.

Rule 120: If you look at an opponent too long, you may get misinformation.

The book goes into more detail on these rules and 282 others. I found most of them to be very useful, and I think the book has really helped my game a great deal.