Featured Authors: Alan Schoonmaker

Most poker authors fall into 2 categories. One type recounts stories from poker games and the other provides strategy and advice on how to play the game. However, our first featured author is neither. He looks at poker from a psychological background and tries to help people understand why they act and feel in certain way.

Alan Schoonmaker received his Phd in Psychology from UC Berkeley and then did research and taught at UCLA, Carnegie-Mellon, and The Catholic University of Louvain. He also worked as a business consultant before ultimately moving on to poker. He has published one poker book so far called The Psychology of Poker and has a second book on the way. He also writes regularly for Card Player Magazine. (All biographical material was obtained from the Two Plus Two website.)

You can find his Card Player articles archived at Card Players official site and you can find information about his book at Two Plus Two. Here are some of his articles to start with.

It's a Great Party, But... Part 1 - One of Schoonmaker's many multipart aticles. In this, he discusses the state of poker today and where it is going. Using Darwinian theory, he hypothesizes that the current fishy state of poker won't last as more and more fish either die out or get teeth of their own.

Freud and Poker - Jamin is planning on posting about this article so I'll refrain from saying much about it. It is an interesting little piece about why people act the way they do at the poker table. He uses Freud's ideas to explain this.

Fun vs Profit - Another article talking about why people who supposedly are trying to maximize their profit choose to play a non-optimal strategy or choose to act in a certain manner at the table when they know it is not a winning way.

http://www.cardplayer.com/poker_magazine/archives/?a_id=13012&m_id=49 - Schoonmaker discusses why time and time again many people decide that they want to quit playing poker and if they actually should.

Planning Your Personal Development - Part 1 - The first of a series of 6 articles which first introduced me to Schoonmaker as an author. I believe this series has given me information which will help me a lot in the long run so I will spend some time talking about it. First, these give an in depth walkthrough about how to set a realistic, ultimate goal and then set intermediate goals to help you reach it. Then it moves on to discuss how to evaluate yourself as a poker player in order to see in what areas you are strong and which areas you are weak. It does this by asking you to rate many qualities on a scale of 1-5 in comparison to the players you expect to be playing against. These results can be interesting and surprising. Take mine for example. There are six main categories. I did very well in 4 of the 6. For "Knowledge (Understanding of)" I had 6 of 7 traits listed as assets. For "Knowledge (Depth of)" I had 5 of 7. Under "Personal Traits" I had 22 of 33 and under "Situational Factors" 4 of 5 were listed as assets. The 5th category was "mental abilities" and only 10 of 17 I listed as assets. However, this wasn't unexpected because as a whole the poker community is fairly intelligent. What did surprise me was how I did in the 6th category "Skills." In this, only 16 of 31 skills did I list as assets against the poker players I would most likely be playing against. I have been a winning online poker player for 8 months now and I would have expected that to be due to greater skill when in actuality it seems it may have been due to better knowledge and personal traits. The bright spot of this anaylsis is that I now have a list of 15 "skills" that I need to improve upon and I plan on doing that. This was where this was most helpful to me. Before I read these articles, I could maybe list 3 or 4 skills I needed to improve upon when compared against my current competition. This helped me better see how far I still need to go to become a really good poker player and it very well could help you too.