There are plenty of people who tell me it is foolish to read books as they are outdated and they would rather spend that time playing poker and gaining experience. They argue "street smarts" is better than book smart. Actually, in many ways as a generalization I agree that someone who is only book smart may have an incredibly flawed game. Afterall, there are books with conflicting information and without enough experience to differentiate good advice from bad advice you will simply suffer information overload and you will fail to develop a style that works for you.
However, ultimately poker is a game of MATH. If there are any advancements of the game of poker it will come from increased modeling of the mathematical game. It will come from people with spreadsheets and programming experience.
There are those that claim 10,000 hours is what it requires at minimum for mastery. I can't disagree. However, if you are applying 10,000 hours of uninformed poker without understanding the textbook application and fundamentals, what are you mastering? You will not be mastering "elite poker" or "winning poker" at a high level. You must have something to give that "feedback loop" to make constant adjustments based upon math, rather than luck. If you simply play poker with no bookwork you will become results oriented, your experience and development of intuition and instinct may help you put someone on a hand range or know when they are bluffing but to actually boil it down to probabilities and determine if the pot odds is sufficient to call? you need 10,000 hours of knowing the math, book work, and so much more.
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