Intuition?

[CrisBrown]

Hi All,

A horse that's probably been beaten to death here, but I thought I'd trot it out again.

How often do you rely on intuition when making decisions at the table? One particular example comes to mind for me. I often will muck a quasi-playable hand, even in fairly good position, because "I can smell a big hand out there." I've no other way to explain it. It's probably some combination of the betting patterns, the pauses before betting, or some such, but I just KNOW my AJo is dead meat, even from the CO, even for a limp or a min-raise, and in the muck it will go. And FAR more often than not ... someone behind me will toss in a big raise, and some early limper comes crashing in over the top, and I think ... I knew I smelled a big hand....

Oddly, I never PLAY a hand because "I have a feeling...." But I'll often MUCK a quasi-playable hand because "I can smell a big hand out there...."

Does this seem bizarre? Is it subconscious reasoning, pattern-recognition in what's happening at the table, etc.?

I don't know. But I do trust it.

Cris

[jrobb83]

[ QUOTE ]
I'll often MUCK a quasi-playable hand because "I can smell a big hand out there

[/ QUOTE ]

I find myself doing this sometimes too. I look down to see a lower-level good hand like AJo or AQo and something in my head will tell me to lay it down.

I think is probably has a little to do with subconciously recognizing betting patterns, reading pauses, something like that. Also I'm sure we remember the times when we "had a feeling" and laid down AJo pf and feel great when we see AK take down the pot much better than when we pay that hand off all the way.

[eric5148]

I never ever make decisions based on intuition. It's possible you are getting intuition confused with having a good read on the other players. You can get a "feel" for how your opponents are playing just by watching the game for while, even if your not really trying to focus on their play.

I think it would be interesting if you made a spreadsheet of all the times you made a decicion based on what you believe is intuition. Then post it here after about a thousand of these decisions.

[Dynasty]

I've never folded AJo and especially not AQo based on intuition. I doubt I've ever folded a hand pre-flop for these reasons.

But, I have folded hands like top pair after the flop for reasons which are best attributed to intuition or subconcious reasoning.

[James Boston]

I have nothing to back this up, and someone like Dr. Al probably knows much more about this than I do, but here goes. Things like "intuition" and "gut feelings" are most likely the result of you processing information subconsiously and then not reckognizing it when you have a "feeling." My play on the flop and beyond is often guided by this, and with good results.

[Kinli]

I'm a relatively inexperienced player, so anything I have to say must be regarded with suspicion.

However, most of my play *is* intuitive, and that intuitive feeling steadily grows better. I'm not one who can quickly calculate odds or outs and never will be. But the simple fact the my "intuition" seems to steadily improve leads me to believe that experience is building a data bank I'm tapping into without realizing it... in short, reading my own hands better, reading flops better, and, most importantly, reading the behavior of other players better.

I'm convinced that intuition is the sum of experience processed at a subconscious level.

Kinli

[NaobisDad]

There is not a lot to be said about intuition. I'm sure that empirical findings will show that your intuition is an inadequate predictor of events.

That said, I do play on what you might describe as intuition. It might be many things, but is probably just the sum of a lot of variables at play (e.g., the conduct of players, the way previous hands went down, your image, the image of others, your stacksize etc.)

One thing that is probably important however, is that that feeling that you describe as intuition will cause you to play differently. If I were to play my AJ against my intuition of laying it down, I'm probably more prone to err than when I feel I have a good shot with it. And in that sense there is a lot to be said about following your intuition; if only for the fact that it prefents you from playing your A-game.

I do play a lot of bigbet poker hands on feel. But it's not often in the way you describe. I will play them because I 'feel' the others are gonna fold or allow themselves to be outplayed by me. And that can be attributed to a lot less 'fague' factors.

Edit: It could be that what you describe as intuition is actually familiarity with a certain situation in more ways than you can consciously imagine. This would especially be the case if you've played a lot of poker, which most of us have.

There are studies by Damasio that show that peripheral feedback (i.e., from the body) can be conditioned to certain situations, in that sense aiding our decision making process. That would lead to decision that were not fully based on rational processes, but on 'feeling' instead, which you aptly call 'intuition'.

Damasio has published a book about this recently, I don't know the title but you should be able to find it easily. There has been critisism of course and I suggest that you look into that as well if you do decide to study this concept further.

[Al Schoonmaker]

You wrote: "I'm convinced that intuition is the sum of experience processed at a subconscious level."
Prof. Arthur Reber, co-author of "Gambling for Dummies," used the term "implicit learning" for this process. It appeared in several academic papers.
In "Super/System" Doyle Brunson essentially agreed with you. He wrote: “Whenever I use the word ‘feel”... I recall what happened... Even though I might not consciously do so... I recall that this same play came up (or something close to it) and this is what he did or somebody else did. So I get a feeling that he’s bluffing or that I can make a play here and get the pot. But, actually my subconscious mind is reasoning it all out.” (pages 430 ff).
Although Doyle and some other great players have been intuitive, I think that logic is far better. It can be taught, while you are either born with intuition or have to do without it. In other words, if you have great "feel" or intuition, use it. If not, learn how to play logically.
I must add that Sklansky and Malmuth and the other 2+2 authors are all solidly in the "play logically" camp. We regard our task as teaching people how to play, while many other books implicitly say, "This is how I play, and, if you don't have my gifts, that's too bad." For example, even though he is among the world greatest players, if you tried to play NLHE the way Doyle suggests in S/S, you will almost certainly go broke.
Regards,
Al

[CrisBrown]

Hi Al,

[ QUOTE ]
Although Doyle and some other great players have been intuitive, I think that logic is far better. It can be taught, while you are either born with intuition or have to do without it. In other words, if you have great "feel" or intuition, use it. If not, learn how to play logically.

[/ QUOTE ]

I don't think this is an either/or proposition. The best players use both logic and intuition. And I disagree with the notion that intuition is a "you have it or you don't" thing. If intuition is the conscious byproduct of subconscious reasoning -- and I think it is -- then it follows that intuition is a product of experience.

Yes, you have to learn to think about the game logically. And yes, I think learning "visible thinking" as you make reads, measure pot odds vs. outs, etc. is very important, in large part because in so doing you are training your intuition.

By way of analogy, I used to play a lot of basketball. (In fact, I coached for a couple of years.) Now, when you're learning the game, you focus on very fundamental things ... how do you dribble, make a bounce pass vs. a chest pass vs. a lob pass, etc. A good coach will force you to attend to the little details, very consciously, so you learn how to do it correctly.

But if all of that stuff doesn't become "automatic," you're never going to do well at the game. During the game, you can't be thinking "elbows out, step forward, snap through" as you're making a chest pass. There's too much else going on, and you're not going to be able to focus on the other variables, like whether a defender is reading your eyes and leaning toward the passing lane, in which case that pass is very likely to get stolen.

And at some point, reading that defender will also become intuitive (subconscious). You won't consciously be aware of that defender following your eyes and leaning into the passing lane. You'll just know that while your teammate seems to be open, it would be a mistake to make that pass, and you'll already be looking elsewhere on the court for another opportunity.

Eventually, if you have good coaching, you learn to acquire what Larry Bird referred to as "soft focus," where it feels as if you're seeing only shapes, colors, and movement. Nothing seems distinct, and yet you're seeing the entire court at once, and your brain is sifting through all of that data based on thousands of hours of experience. At that point, it feels as if you're literally seeing into the future; you know where the other players and the ball are going to go, long before they get there, and you're already reacting before it happens.

When I coached, in addition to fundamentals, strategy, and tactics,I focused on teaching techniques that would lead players toward that expanded court-consciousness. At first these exercises struck the players as very strange -- I'd have them close their eyes and continue to move for two or three seconds, pointing to their opponents and the ball, then open their eyes and see if their opponents and the ball were where they predicted; as well as visual imaging, relaxation, and concentration exercises -- but they quickly realized they were learning to experience more of what was happening on the court, in an intuitive way.

So yes, I think you can learn intuition, and I think you do it by practicing the "visible thinking" that you and other 2+2 authors advocate. With experience, the fundamentals of that conscious "logic" become subconscious "intuition," and that allows you to focus your conscious thoughts on deeper layers of the game. In time, those too become "intuition," and by then you've learned new subtleties that you process in your visible, "logical" thoughts.

But sometimes those subconscious processes will push their way up through the conscious thoughts, in the form of an intuitive hunch -- "something doesn't feel right here," or "I can take this pot with a strong bet" -- and I think in the long run it pays to attend to those hunches.

Cris

[Gramps]

I won't go too far off on some science/philosophy tanget, but Western culture is still stuck in Newtonian-oriented thinking, tends to be overly mechancial, and focuses on what's readily measurable. Things that aren't readily measurable are often dismissed, or we don't have a good language to describe them. That doesn't mean that they're not very real.

"Feel" is one of those things. Jason Kidd throwing the no looker to Richard Jefferson who he knows will cut to the space he sees. Jazz musicians improvising together, playing off each other back and forth, in sync and connected in a subconscious way.

Etc., etc.

Feel is real. Communication happens on all sorts of subconscious levels. Nothing wrong with trusting your gut on a borderline/semi-borderline situation. It might be telling you something your "measurement-oriented" conscious is missing.