Top 10 books every poker player should read: Malcolm Gladwell

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:

• Cowboys Full: The Story of Poker by James McManus
• How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer
• Fooling Houdini: Magicians, Mentalists, Math Geeks and the Hidden Powers of the Mind by Alex Stone
• Blink/Tipping Point/Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell
• 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 Expert at the Card Table by  S.W. Erdnase
• The Mathematics of Poker by Bill Chen and Jerrod Ankenman

Blink/Tipping Point/Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell

This trifecta of works was penned by New Yorker columnist, and the man I consider the greatest essayist of our time Malcolm Gladwell. All three books deliver in both writing and in content, and since I couldn’t decide which book I liked better I simply put all three on this list.

Blink focuses on how we process information in decision-making. The main takeaway of the book is that focusing on important details is far more beneficial than collecting an abundance of data –something every poker player should be able to relate to.

In Tipping Point Malcolm Gladwell explains how tiny changes can suddenly send an idea into the mainstream. This is probably the least relatable of the three books to poker, but still offers some excellent food for thought on plenty of tpics.

Outliers is the treatise on hard work, and is the clearest explanation of the 10,000 hour rule, but the book also focuses on being in the right place at the right time, which poker players in 2003 are well aware of.

So why are these three books on the list? The answer is simple; they cause you to think differently and explore different possibilities, which is precisely how you must wire your brain to think at the poker tables.

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