Carson says intuition is "some kind of gut feeling about a situation." So far, so good. Then he says, "I've actually had experiences at the table where images of cards flashed in my brain." He then goes on to give the 3h-5h example. He says images of these cards flashed in his head.


As Sredni so eloquently points out, when the flop is 2h-4h-6h, it would be natural for images of the 3h-5h to flash in one's head. But would it be natural to intuit that an opponent, who I assume had cold-called Carson's pre-flop raise (he says the opponent was in late position), and now raised on the flop, had a straight flush? Carson says "something about the player and the way he made that bet put the picture of those two cards in my head." Apparently the guy raises on the flop in a certain way when he has a straight flush after cold-calling a raise with 5-3 pre-flop.


With all due respect, this is hogwash. We've all had experiences where we've felt something was going to happen, and then it happened. But for every time this occurs, we have thousands of feelings that things will happen that don't happen.

In this case, the odds of his opponent having a straight flush were 1081 to 1. The odds of him having a straight flush among the hands he would have raised with are much less, so the odds of Carson having made a lucky, somewhat educated guess are considerably less than the chance that images of cards flashing in his brain flashed there because his opponent held them in his hand. This is because the chance of the latter happening is zero.


My dictionary has two definitions of intuition. The first is "knowing without the use of rational processes." This is what Carson is getting at. Such a thing does not exist. It is extrasensory perception. The second definition is "sharp insight." This does exist. But it is not what Carson is saying. Sharp insight would not have put the opponent on a straight flush.


Anyway, it's not very important as it is two paragraphs in a 313 page book. There's already been a post on the Books/Software forum and I've included a few other quotes from the book in a responding post there.