Top 10 books every poker player should read: Cowboys Full

Poker is a game of continuing education, and if you are not continually learning as a poker player the game is going to pass you by. One of the best, and most commonly used, ways of improving your game is to read. This doesn’t necessarily mean you have to be reading poker strategy books (which at a certain point become very repetitious and lack any real insight that you don’t already know) as there are plenty of books on poker theory to choose from, and plenty of non-poker books that fit in perfectly with the game.

This article series will rundown my list of the 10 books every poker player should read, giving a brief overview of the content and why it’s must-reading for poker players.  Lacking from this list will be any mention of specific poker strategy books, but I would recommend that all new or struggling poker players pick up a volume on whichever game they are playing: be it tournaments (Jonathan Little’s Secrets of Professional Tournament Poker would be a great read) or PLO cash-games (in this case you can read any of the books written by Rolf Slotboom or Robert Hwang).

Each article in this series will focus on a specific book from the following list:

• The Expert at the Card Table by  S.W. Erdnase
• Fooling Houdini: Magicians, Mentalists, Math Geeks and the Hidden Powers of the Mind by Alex Stone
• Cowboys Full: The Story of Poker by James McManus
• Blink/Tipping Point/Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell
• How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer
• Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
• The Mental Game of Poker by Jared Tendler
• Treat Your Poker Like a Business by Dusty Schmidt
• Freakonomics by Steven Levitt
• The Mathematics of Poker by Bill Chen and Jerrod Ankenman

Cowboys Full: The Story of Poker by James McManus

Cowboys Full: The Story of Poker is what you would expect to get if the history of poker was taught as a college course. James McManus does a terrific job of tracing the games history and colorful stories and characters throughout the rather lengthy period of time that poker (and the card games that spawned modern poker) has been en vogue.

So, why should poker players read this book? The answer is simple, if you want to understand the game, and understand where it came from and where it’s going, you need to know the history. I once described this book as microcosm of playing poker, in that the book details the highs and lows of poker in both popularity and legality, and gives the reader a pretty good understanding of what separated winners from losers at every stop along the way.

Cowboys Full won’t make you a better poker player, but it will arm you with knowledge of the allure of the game and why so many different people from all different walks of life are drawn to the game. I guess the simplest explanation for reading this book is: Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.