I’ve been a little loose in reading poker books this year, which goes well with actually being a little loose in playing poker as well. So I’ve just read Sherry Bykovsky’s pretty good new book, “Poker’s Kaizen: How to Continuously Improve Holdom Games,” which was released in June.
This book is not about how to play poker. It’s about how to play poker better, which may sound like a difference that doesn’t make a difference, until you start reading this book.
Unlike a lot of Poker 101 books I’ve read, they don’t have an overview of the rules or the starting hand chart or anything like that. (There are a few Fort Oz charts, but it’s pretty close to the end.) Some of these are not high-end Poker books, but they’re not really Poker 101 books. It’s actually meant to help players learn how to improve efficiently where they are at any level, but in practice, there are cases where very basic and more advanced concepts are included, and the reader just needs to figure out which ones to pay attention to.
The theorem at the center of the book is Kaizen, a concept derived from Japanese management. (For Westerners, the Japanese version of “improvement,” once no ancient spiritual concept here, is quite modern. The Japanese have developed their management culture more efficiently and productively over the past three decades, because Western executives thought their leaders came up with genius ideas such as “Fire people to increase morale, fire more people,” and “Put a ping-pong table instead of a human resources department!”) 온라인경마
A very short version of Kaizen is the principle of continuous improvement, which means that the company develops systems for constant learning, feedback acquisition and response, and rewarding improvements. In poker, the reward for improvement is getting more money, but the desire to get more money is not the same as having a plan. Also, in poker, you’re just one person, not a company. But the principle still applies: there are many different aspects of the game, so there is a big difference between approaching the game as a whole and deciding that only one or a few aspects are “real” or something important, perhaps like math, which is a stereotypically Western approach.
The Kaizen of poker is divided into two parts. Part one is called the “Morning After Checklist,” which makes up at least three-quarters of the book. Part two is called the “Continuously Improving Basic – Basic,” and it looks the most similar to the poker strategy book. The first part is, essentially, all the things you need to review to check your leak location after you play the game. The idea here is to break up the entire experience of playing poker into components, and look at each of them individually. Therefore, the list includes health and wellness/mental game items. It starts with appearing in a well-rested and mentally alert game, and then goes to the important parts of position, discipline, aggression, and reading and reacting to other players.