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Paid To Play Poker: A Scientific Approach to Winning Poker

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I read this book about a year ago and though I enjoyed the read and musing over the approach, I did not write the review I intended to. Upon scanning it again today looking for one specific item I decided to look at other reviews and realized there were none - and this book deserves to be on the bookshelves of serious poker players.

This is a great read and in my opinion any player can learn much about how to evaluate his/her own game from it. Barton Gratt claims to have made his living as a prop player - paid by the casino to play in order to fill the table so that a game would "make." I know this practice has been used by casinos but have no directly applicable experience so I have to take the author's word with respect to specifics.

The meat of the book, however, is not directly related to the "paid player" aspect of his experience. Instead the value springs from the approach described and advocated for evaluating ones own game.

The author used a "scientific approach" to analyzing his experience. This essentially means that he recorded his results along with a large number of variables that were expected to influence the profitability of his play. Every player knows that performance goes down when he isn't feeling well, but few of us have ever recorded that information and quantitatively evaluated how it influences our performance. This is only one of many factors evaluated in this book.

His data collection sheet includes a large number of variables including:
* The month, day of week, and time of play
* The makeup of the table - number of players and number of "fish" and "toughs"
* His position relative to dealer, most aggressive player, and tightest player

Other factors he considers are personal factors including:
* General well being at the time of the game
* Fatigue and sleepiness
* Confidence level
* Betting skill
* Card reading ability

The results recorded are very specific to the author and will be of limited value to the reader. The concepts embodied, however, are universal and consideration of each factor - indeed collection of some personal data - should quickly reveal the major leaks in the reader's game.

It is easy to think "I already know where the leaks are." But there is something powerful about collecting the numbers and seeing in black and white just what the leak is costing you. And that's the reason I think reading this book - and acting on what you learn from it - will improve your game.