Poker Articles

I have a theory.  Maybe just a hunch.  Call it wishful thinking even.  But I believe better people make better poker players.  Certainly, a sociopath might have an advantage where aggression is concerned.  However, when we think about long-term success across a decades-long career, poker longevity can only truly be achieved by those individuals who have their acts together.

Every poker book written by every poker expert will archly discuss the importance of such personal attributes as patience, self-discipline, psychological control.  Yet, few, if any, teach you how to acquire those traits.

The books listed here will provide an excellent base to improve your life-roll management.   

1. Blink - Malcolm Gladwell

Gladwell maintains that we "blink" when we think without thinking. We do that by "thin-slicing," using limited information to come to a conclusion. In what Gladwell contends is an age of information overload, he finds experts often make better decisions with snap judgments than they do with reams of analysis.

Sometimes we over-think things. Sometimes you just have to go with your read.
 

2. A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose - Eckhart Tolle

"Be aware that what you think, to a large extent, creates the emotions that you feel.  See the link between your thinking and your emotions.  Rather than being your thoughts and emotions, be the awareness behind them."
 

3. Zen In the Art of Archery - Eugen Herrigel

Through years of practice, an activity becomes effortless both mentally and physically. The body becomes capable of executing often complex, often difficult movements without conscious control by the mind.

"The archer ceases to be conscious of himself as the one who is engaged in hitting the bull's-eye which confronts him. This state of unconscious is realized only when, completely empty and rid of the self, he becomes one with the perfecting of his technical skill, though there is in it something of a quite different order which cannot be attained by any progressive study of the art..."
 

4. If - Rudyard Kipling

The first few lines of the title poem say it all.
 
IF you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting...

5. The Bible

The Main Event of literature as far as I am concerned. 

Good for bankroll management.  "Covet not thy neighbor's ass."

The 23rd Psalm is always excellent to keep in mind when shoving all your chips into the middle of the table.
 

6. WOODEN: A Lifetime of Observations and Reflections On and Off The Court
    - John Wooden 

ESPN's show "Who's Number 1?" ranked Mr. Wooden as the greatest coach of all time in any sport. "Intensity makes you stronger. Emotionalism makes you weaker."
 

7. Personal Best - George Sheehan, M.D.

I knew George Sheehan.  He was either the most normal great man I have ever encountered or the greatest normal man.  I wish I had thought to tell him that.  He would have laughed.  Modestly, of course...

"The memorable thing is not to excel against others but to excel against yourself...The real trophy is within.  The real trophy is the self."

8. The Last Lecture - Randy Pausch

“We cannot change the cards we are dealt, just how we play the hand."

Many professors give talks entitled “The Last Lecture.” Professors are asked to consider their demise and to reflect on what matters most to them. While they speak, each member of the audience can’t help but ponder the same question: What wisdom would I share with the world if I knew it was my last opportunity? If I dropped dead tomorrow, what would I want as my legacy?

Randy Pausch, a professor at Carnegie Mellon, was asked to give such a lecture. He didn’t have to imagine it as his last, as he had recently been diagnosed with terminal cancer. But the lecture he gave—“Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams”—wasn’t about dying. It was about the importance of overcoming obstacles, of enabling the dreams of others, of seizing every moment (“time is all you have...and you may find one day that you have less than you think”). The Last Lecture is a summation of everything Pausch had come to believe. It is about living. 

9. The Secret - Rhonda Byrne

Laugh if you will.  Come to think about it, those chortling the loudest probably have the greatest need to study these concepts.

According to James Arthur Ray, there is scientific evidence to back up the spiritual practices and laws defined in The Secret. "Science tells us that everything is energy, and so your thoughts are energy. Your body, your cash, your car—everything you think is solid, if you put it under a high-powered microscope, it's just a field of energy and a rate of vibration," he says. "And so are we. So if you think you're this meat suit running around, you have to think again."

One way to describe this energy is by comparing it to radio waves, "The frequency you give out through your thoughts and your emotions is what you have a tendency to manifest in your life," Re. Dr. Michael Beckwith adds. "Whether those thoughts and emotions are conscious or unconscious, it doesn't matter."

If you are sending out the same negative energy over and over—whether thoughts or feelings—you will attract similar energy back to you. Ray explains, when bad things happen people might ask, "Oh, God, why me?"

"Because it is you," he says.
 

10. Collected Essays - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder, because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude."
 

BONUS PICK!!!!
 
11. The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People - Dr. Stephen Covey
 
Habit 7.  Sharpen the Saw.

This is the habit of self-renewal, says Covey.  Self-renewal necessarily surrounds all the other habits, enabling and encouraging them to happen and grow. Covey interprets the self into four parts: the spiritual, mental, physical and the social/emotional, which all need feeding and developing.
 

These books - any one of them - can provide the breakthrough to move you to the next level.  In poker and in life.

Sharpen your edge.