A thought crossed my mind the other day that all serious poker players read up on poker.. book after book. Every time i read a book it reminds me of the beginning of rounders where Matt Damond is gathering his money up to make a run at it and poker books are laying everywhere in the backround....
But if everyone reads the same books and everyone plays to the type of play suggested.. and with poker becoming so popular, won't there be a surplus of generally good players playing tight and aggressive, looking for the right table, noticing those same tells and whatever else poker books have suggested... Because they all learned how to play poker out of generally the same books arn't they all generally playing the same way..
What seperates the great from the good..
could your general cards smarts play a part?
could it be metally mathematical?
could it be feel or emtional?
i study poker theory about 1 hour each night, i make notes, highlight keypoints, set up hands to count odds, and reread sections cause i feel if everyone else out there is reading the same books, i'll have to read more books and work harded then everyone else to better myself.
And how come there are players who read books but still play badly??
do some ppl just suck at poker no matter how many books they read?
How does this affect the future of poker, when information is so easily gain for only a couple of dollars??
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My lead into poker was different to most. Started out from a mathematical/research type project.The way I play (and I think alot of good players) developed over time. I know this because I've watched strong players on the 'net. When I did read my first official 'poker book' I was delighted at how wrong it was..

I lke ppl reading these books..

books can teach you, but so can school.

not everyone who goes to school becomes intelligent.

I encourage book reading for ALL players, 1 out of 10 will become a decent player or better. the rest just become easy to read and figure out what they are doing. And then they complain about a bad beat and go on complete tilt

To add to what Steve said, reading a book can be done by a 10 year old. The patience and discipline necessary to apply the knowledge in the book and pattern mapping is personal. Not to mention, every poker game has winners and losers.

If you do a quick search of this forum you will see quite a few threads where we disagree about things. How is this possible if we all read the same books?

I'm definetly the tightest player who regularly posts on here, so why doesn't everyone who has read the same and quite possibly more poker books as me play as tight?

well there are a couple reasons

#1 People process information differently, people can read the same thing and get 2 opposite meanings from it. What I percieve to be tight/aggressive play is not neccasarilly the conclusion someone else will come to.

#2 Each persons patience level and self control are different. I have no problem sitting around and waiting for hands where others need to be more involved or they would go on tilt, which is more costly than overplaying a few hands. So for these people playing super tight would actually be a bad strategy since it will send them on tilt.

It isn't that people are just bad poker players, some just don't care to apply what they have read, others don't understand it, and still others don't have the discipline to apply it. Knowledge and properly applying that knowledge are 2 seperate things.

Natural ability is also important, I can remeber lines from movies that I haven't seen in years where other people can't remember their phone number. I've also always been good at sizing people up and I am a stickler for details so I pay close attention to everything.