Plagiarism among poker books

I was going back through some old rec.gambling.poker threads stored at groups.google.com and ran across this one. Alan Shoonmaker accused me of plagierism, of coping ideas like loose and tight and passive and aggresive from his book.

I'm not sure but I don't think he was talking about a copyright violation. He seemed to be claiming that I stole fundemental ideas from him. As if no poker writer before him had ever had the thought that some players play tighter than the norm and some play looser than the norm.

Anyway I think his accusations are interesting, and to me they are very revealing about the way the guy thinks. It's a fairly muddled way of thinking. It's particularly interesting in light of the "style matrix" that provides the fundemental framework of his Psychology of Poker is lifted with almost no modification and no attribution from Blake and Mouton (1964).

Shoonmaker touts himself as a psychologist, he's an industrial psychologist which is just an alternate term for organizational theorists and his academic experience is mostly business school, management and organizational theory, related. The Blake and Mouton model was very, very popular in business schools in the 1960's and 70's, there's no doubt that Schoomaker was very familar with it.

I thought is might be interesting to use the blog to review rec.gambling.poker history from time to time and I just couldn't resist the opportunity to trash Dr. Al.