I have made a lot of mistakes during my life and a lot of mistakes during my poker career. I don’t just mean during the actual hands themselves because with poker being a game of incomplete information then mistakes during the play of the hands are inevitable. I am talking about much more serious errors in failing to look at the game in a certain way or trying to learn something incorrectly.

I think that one of the most important things that any player will come to realise when they first start out in poker is that you are not going to master this game in any short time frame. In my mind, poker is as difficult a subject to learn and master as any other out there in my opinion. It’s a bit like studying outer space, the more that you study and learn then you realise that what you are actually looking at is an awful lot bigger than you first thought.

But even so, reading any material that you thought would not teach you anything can still throw up surprises. The mistakes that I was referring to earlier were mistakes in how I was going about learning the game of poker.

I started out just like most players, I read as many books as I could lay my hands on and just read and read and read. Reading and educating yourself is not necessarily a bad thing of course but the problem with reading gambling material is that most people who are reading it are contemplating at some stage with putting what they have read into practice and in gambling, this means putting their own money at risk.

It is a lot different to reading a book on say the industrial revolution. If the author of that book has failed to do his research or is incorrect with his opinions and conclusions then the only harm done is that the reader will now have the same incorrect and warped opinions as the author. But it is a lot different with gambling books because the people who are reading them are doing so because they are seeking education in that field with a view to putting what they have learnt into action.

This is the major difference but an even greater obstacle which confronts players who begin their poker journey in this way is that they find it very difficult to distinguish between good books and bad books and good authors and bad authors. I want to take a further look at this in part two as I feel that it merits a several part discussion so do please look out for that.

But even if you successfully learn to differentiate the good from the bad, then a whole host of different problems are waiting for you around the corner. For instance, the poker world is a forever changing moving landscape and this makes learning poker from books problematic.

Carl “The Dean” Sampson
Author – “Winning Cash Game Poker”

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.