How do you react to bad books?
My mom does not know much about poker. I taught her the rules one evening, when we were bored, but she played so weak tight, it wasn’t fun to play with her. She would only bet if she had it and always was afraid to bluff. She is a tad interested in poker, though, because she is a psychologist. She just hates the gambling/money aspect of the game. I still don’t know if she thinks that poker is a game of skill. I know after explaining to her 1000 times that blackjack is beatable through card counting, she still doesn’t believe me. She just knows the stories of patients that have gambling problems and lose their shirt playing blackjack. She is not a very math inclined person, so you could show her an equation and she still wouldn’t believe me card counting gives you an edge at blackjack. Now poker it is even harder to prove you have an edge, yet because of the psychology aspect, she is willing to halfway believe it might be beatable (go figure!).
Anyway, one nice thing about my mother is that even though she finds it sort of strange that I have poker as my hobby, she totally respects it and even has bought me some books (Professional NLHE, go figure I play limit, Psychology of Poker, which I like very much…). Last week she bought me a new book: Poker and Philosophy. This is part of a series of books that go a bit deeper, more philosophically on any given subject in popular culture (link). She had read Harry Potter and Philosphy and had really liked it. So she wanted to make me a small present and gave me the book. Aw ♥ mom!
Anyway, so I started reading it. At first I was fascinated. YES! Life is like poker, poker is like life. There are so many parallels and you can draw so many of life’s lessons from poker and vice versa. This book is amazing. But then on an extra long bathroom session 
, I realized something… it was written for fish!
There was a paragraph that explains you have to take risks and that you have to trust you intuition sometimes, no matter what mathematics says. The author was talking about drawing to an inside straight when you know that was the only thing that you are drawing to and you don’t have the odds to call the bet. And then the author says that sometimes you have the intuition that sometimes the next card is going to make you win that pot, which made your decision correct. *cringe* *cringe*. Talk about being results oriented!
The book goes on and on about this. The most glorifying chapter is about the “All-In” move. That is like your biggest jumps in life and that people should go all-in in their life more and yadda yadda yadda. In short, the book is nice and staying in my bathroom, but I won’t devote one second to the “strategy” it postulates.
Then I started thinking, if all these educated philosphy professors are writing so fishy things, how many more educated people are there playing poker and reading this crap as strategy. How many people have learned to play Hold’em from Phil Helmuth’s book or Danie Negreanu’s, or Johnny Chan’s? All three complete crap, BTW. How many people believe in the ESP **** that Doyle put in the SS? What about the first edition of “Winning Low Limit Hold’em” (the 3rd on is ok, even if it’s still weak, but it’s not wrong like the 1st one)?
I still don’t know how to react to bad strategy books. Should I be happy that they are out there and that people are learning to play wrong because of them? Sort of like “don’t educate the fish” kind of attitude. Or should I be irrate that people are misinforming the public. As a scientist who gets her papers refereed over and over again, being mathematically precise, correct and having the resulst reproducable is the most important thing there is. Publishing wrong results just puts us back decades in the pursuit of the scientific truth. But poker is not science. Let’s face it, you make the most money from the misinformation of your opponent, be it in the form of ignorance, misapplication of the information or simply bad information. Why would I like them to know that “Playing Poker like the Pros” is a really bad book?
What’s your take on this? And what should I tell my mom when she asks how I like the book? 
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Comments
Poker books are like everything else in life. Some are good, some are bad and others are everywhere in between.
Instead of asking how you react to bad poker books… why not ask what would happen if there was a poker book that actually worked! What if there was a poker book so good that anyone reading it would master the game?
There is a great book called Happiness written by Will Ferguson… it is about a publisher the puts out a self help book that actually works. Everyone that reads the book has the tools to solve all of their problems! Sounds wonderful right? The first thing to fall is the tobacco industry - no more need for smokes, the the alchol industry and then the credit cards. Society as we know it crumbles. Anyways, it is a good read… no doubt better that the Philosophy of Poker.
The fact that there are bad books is a good thing for poker, generally. If people read a bad book, and then think they’re going to hit the local card room or online site, and immediately start on the path to riches, it’s a good thing for us (we’re all excellent players, aren’t we 
)–we’ll be there to profit from the poor play of our opponents.
I find the first part of the post more interesting. It’s so easy to prove that blackjack is a beatable game. Set yourself up as the player against your mom as the “house”–she has to play by typical BJ rules, e.g., dealer must hit 16, and stand on 17. Then tell her that the deck for this game will only include five cards, and those cards are three Eights, and two Sevens. Anyone who understands blackjack will see that the player can bet the ranch, and be assured of winning every time. I’ll leave the proof as an exercise for the reader–if anyone wants more of an explanation, let me know.
Poker is a little more difficult to explain, but the best way to illustrate that it’s a skill game is this seemingly perverse observation: The best hand doesn’t always win. If we played a poker game where everybody called all bets to the end, and we just played showdown every time, nobody could be a winner, theoretically. It’s the skill factor involved in value-betting and getting called by a worse hand, or bluffing and getting a better hand to fold, or having the sense to not play a marginal hand in the first place, that gives poker a skill element.
Try running that by Mom and see how it goes…
I tend to believe that good players/readers/learners get something from everything they read — whether it is good or bad. By the same token, poor players/readers/learners get little or nothing from what they read.