Editor's pick

East (Sort of) Meets West in Poker Philosophy Book

Product

The Tao of Poker by Larry W. Phillips

Hits

  • Excellent strategies for common problems with people's poker games
  • Easy to read and to understand
  • Includes section on Internet play

Misses

  • Not for the beginning poker player
  • No hand strategy or analysis
  • Only very loosely connected to Taoism

Review

Taoism places an emphasis on the unity of the universe, the unity of the material world and the spiritual world, the unity of the past, present and future. That's a hard concept to connect to the poker world, and Larry W. Phillips' attempt to do so in The Tao of Poker doesn't necessarily succeed.

At best, some of the advice in The Tao of Poker could be connected to Taoism, such as trying to insert yourself into the flow of the game and changing up your strategies and how you operate to match what's going on around you rather than trying to fight against it. For the most part, though, Phillips has perhaps gone just one step too far in trying to fit popular Eastern philosophies to poker.

That being said, the book is still an excellent compliment to his Zen and the Art of Poker and provides readers with a lot of strategies that can help them improve their poker game.

While Zen focused more on the psychology of the player, Tao looks more at the actual game. It covers everything from premium hands and making correct decision to bluffing and trapping. There are even sections on luck, because every poker player knows there is an element of luck and you have to recognize when your luck has gone cold and when it's running hot.

"This is advice for the part-time, low-level, recreational player. It is advice for your brother-in-law, your neighbor, or your daughter's boyfriend, who you might encounter in a card room getting crushed in a poker game. If they are 'running bad,' they ought to leave the game," Philips says in the book.

However, that advice doesn't necessarily extend to the experienced players. Instead, those players may think on a higher plane of wisdom - they look beyond that one session and see their game as a year-long stretch or an infinite horizon.

For them, the philosophy would be to "never leave a game at all due to bad luck, unless it is affecting your play in other ways."

The book offers strategies and rules along those same lines for all aspects of the poker game. For example, Chapter 8 deals with the lure of loose and sloppy play because it can make the game more exciting. Rule 85 in that chapter states:

"Sometimes when we get way up in a poker game, we forget that it's money and start thinking of it as 'just chips.' So we start to play a little looser, start fooling around a bit, and soon we notice that we're up only half as much. It's not until the end of the game that we realize it was, after all, real money we were playing for."

It even offers three good rules for poker in regards to your relations with other players:

1. Play as well as you can every session and enjoy the people.

2. Never mock a new player or acquaintance in poker, because in six months or so you may find he is a very good friend.

3. Most longtime players would agree that if they never won another dime in the game of poker, the people they met through the game would have made the whole experience worthwhile.

This book isn't going to teach you any super secrets that will improve your game. It's best read after learning the basics and figuring out where your game may need tweaking in other areas. You will find great advice for the aspects of poker that take place outside of the actual cards you play.

Details:

  • Paperback $9.99
    Adams Media