Best Poker Book U ever Read:

[AaronBrown]

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I understand why so many put TOP on their list. Having started with Livingston, Scarne, Moorehead and Wallace, TOP seemed a better collection of many of the same ideas but didn't quite have the same impact as it might have had I not been exposed to these other authors and titles.

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That's interesting, I would have said the opposite. I'm old enough to have read TOP when it first came out, and it's impact on serious players was dramatic. It was the first rational exposition of real poker theory. There were plenty of articles by mathematicians about what they thought poker should be, and books by players with accumulated wisdom, but no real theory book. Even if you disagreed with TOP, and there are points to argue, it defined the debate in a way people could make progress.

The ideas were so successful, that they are part of the fabric of poker today, and you can absorb them from many other sources. It's like the joke, "I don't know what's so great about Shakespeare, all he did was string a bunch of old sayings together." I'd have thought a lot of younger players would think TOP just catalogued a lot of stuff everyone knows. It's good to know it still has substance.