Top 10 books every poker player should read: The Expert at the Card Table

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

The Expert at the Card Table, by S.W. Erdnase

The Expert at the Card Table was written as a treatise on how to manipulate cards (cheat) and perform sleight of hand and other “magic” tricks. Despite being written in 1901, The Expert at the Card Table is still considered one of the go-to books for aspiring magicians and card cheats. The book was written under the false name S.W. Erdnase, and while rumors abound as to whom the real author was (most likely a famous magician at the time) over a century later the jury is still out.

So why is this book on my list of must-read books for poker players? Simple, it’s not to teach you how to cheat, but it’s incredibly important to not get cheated! By reading this book you will have a very good understanding on what card manipulators are doing and the ways they will try to distract and deceive you at the poker tables.

The Expert at the Card Table covers a variety of different topics, and while overly technical at times will explain to you all of the rudimentary ways to shuffle, deal, and perform sleight of hand tricks. Transformations, blind shuffles, palming cards, false cuts, marking cards, bottom-dealing, and even why you should never display your abilities, are just some of the concepts covered in the book.

The Expert at the Card Table also includes plenty of diagrams and pictures to further illustrate the concepts being discussed.