Reading More Than Tells!

A nice couple, about retirement age, seeming still very much in love, recently approached me about buying a modest home in Las Vegas. They had moved to town with the idea that the husband would pursue his dream of playing poker in Vegas to supplement their retirement income. But he was limited in experience and unsure of his abilities, and wanted to play in the small-limit games and improve his skills from there before moving up. They had allocated $40,000 as a starting bankroll to his new profession, and I thought the money had significant meaning to their lives.

Looking to help them prosper in their new adventure, I asked the man if he had read any poker books. He said he hadn't. I recommended several books to him. "Can't you just learn from experience?" he asked. "Don't you know good players who have never read a book?" he added. The man seemed determined not to read a poker book.

Well, I do know some good players who have never read a poker book. They figured out effective play by trial and error over the course of time, generally a long time. The trouble with using just experience as an educational guide is that you generally learn from your mistakes. The mistake comes first and then you learn a lesson from it. That, of course, assumes that you recognize that you made a mistake and can figure out the lesson, which is no easy or sure thing, by any means. If someone had taught you the concept prior to the mistake, you would have saved yourself the pain and cost of the error.

The most effective way to learn is to have someone who has successfully "been there, done that" teach you. That way, you can benefit from someone else's errors and experience. The amount of time, effort, and expense expended to acquire the knowledge will be greatly discounted.

Over the course of my poker career, I have always created relationships with good players and have learned much from discussing poker with them. In the early days of my poker career in Washington state, there weren't many top players willing to share their knowledge. I had to learn from other sources. I read all the poker books I could get my hands on. Two books greatly influenced my career. One was The Theory of Poker by David Sklansky. I read it more than 100 times in a two-year period. The book is a conceptual guide to poker with no "hard and fast guidelines" about how to play. That book taught me to get away from thinking in a "strategy by rote" manner about poker and to start thinking conceptually at the poker table. By that I mean, prior to reading that book, I played poker with standard guideline responses that I had engineered. After reading the book, I started asking conceptual questions throughout the play of my hands, deducing the answers, and adjusting my play accordingly. Making that change of premise started the growth of my poker game to a professional level. It also did wonders for my bottom line.

The other book was Mike Caro's Book of Tells. The book is full of pictures and descriptions of common poker tells. As a general rule, tells have much more value when playing against poor to mediocre competition, where the opportunity to find them is much greater. Great poker players are tough to get tells on, as their awareness of them is much greater, although in pot-limit and no-limit games, if you have a tell on a player, he is dead meat. Throughout my poker career I have pretty much stayed in the medium limits, where tells have rich rewards. Reading this book taught me many tells and increased my awareness of the subject, thereby developing my mind's attentiveness to them and my ability to discover many unique tells among the many players with whom I play. I have made a lot of profit from tells in my years at the table.

I just couldn't write a column about reading poker books without including a shameless (but justified) plug of my new book. Real Poker Two: The Play of Hands should be on the bookshelves within a few weeks. Almost every column I have written in the past 10 years that analyzes the play of a hand is included. These columns describe the in-depth thought process I go through when playing a given hand, derived from more than 55,000 hours of experience. Among the many subjects covered are reading hands, adjusting your play as the situation develops, and factoring price into the poker decision process. Poker is a complicated game that has many variables to consider. Many of the concepts described in the analysis of the play of hands are not easy to formulate. It is my hope that giving you insight into professional-level thought processes will help you improve your game.

I hope that the man moving to town heeds my advice and takes up studying the game of poker. The poker games in Las Vegas are going to challenge him. Reading poker books will make learning poker a much cheaper process and will greatly increase his likelihood for success, making his and his wife's lives much richer for the effort. I think his life deserves that effort. Doesn't yours?

Editor's note: Roy Cooke played winning professional poker for 16 years. He is a successful real estate broker/salesperson in Las Vegas – please see his ad on Page 107.