Re: good players without reading books
 

The answer is that you can become very good at poker without ever reading a book. But if you want to increase your chances of becoming a good player, then you should read (good) books.

Think about it this way (based on an idea voiced by Sklansky). Say you have a sample size of 1,000. Of this sample size 100 have read poker books, 900 have not. Of the 900 who have not read a poker book, 75 have become successful, winning players. Of the book readers, 25 have. 75% percent of the winning players have never read a poker book, so it looks like reading poker books is not useful to winning the game.

However, if you look at it differently you'll see that (with these numbers) reading poker books gives you a much higher chance at winning. See, of those who read poker books, 25% because successful players, whereas of those who never read a book, only 8% became successful players. If you as an individual wanted to become a successful player, you'd rather be in the 25% category rather than the 8% one.

Of course, I made these numbers up and have no idea how close they correlate to real life. However, the notion is "don't look at how many people arrive at winning poker without books, look at what will give you the best chances to become a winning player."

Re: good players without reading books
 

Talent, effort and in no small partl the ability to learn from one's errors. Most of us keep making the same mistakes. Books can be a help and a hinderance on this point I think. It's easy to take a book's advice as The Truth and try to shoe-horn some theory into an unsuitable area of practice. You can get misconceptions that you would normally throw away in a second but because you read them you feel you have to do them. If you aret dogmaitc about anything in a game like poker I think it works against you because the ultimate skill is altering your strategy and tactics to the people you are playing.

Re: good players without reading books
 

exactly. also, selection bias. you remember that one awesome player who made it without reading a book, and not the other 1 million who are broke...