Intuition and poker

In his seminal work ‘super system’ Doyle mused on the possibility of ESP in poker musing that sometimes he had an extremely strong sense of the hand his opponent was holding; he concluded that this feeling was his subconscious mind feeding back his years of knowledge and experience.

The subconscious speaks

The question is, does this ‘feeling’ have any practical use when we play poker? Well the subconscious exists for one purpose – to protect us. It’s the lower brain that existed to do important stuff like protect us from predators before all of that got taken care of so we could evolve our higher brains to do really important stuff like read poker articles. Here’s the amazing bit – our subconscious can receive thousands of inputs per second; not only that but it stores them all. Despite the evidence of many drinking sessions to the contrary your brain can remember everything that’s ever happened to you. It uses that information to warn you of danger.

This is the nagging feeling you get when you don’t trust someone you’ve just met but aren’t sure why. Your subconscious is reminding you of something you experienced in the past and trying to protect you from it. The same is true in poker. Ever played a pot and had a nagging feeling from the very start your opponent held a monster and you were destined to lose? Or ever played a hand and you just ‘knew’ your opponent was weak?

Reading the signs

This sounds like magic but it can be real. It’s all your experience of previous poker situations screaming at your conscious brain to pay attention because something significant is happening. If we’re playing live it could be a twitch on someone’s face, the way they hold themselves or the way they break chips. Online it could be their bet sizing that is slightly different or their timing that is different. It can even be us that we’re warning about – that we’re playing badly or making a mistake in this hand; our subconscious brain has seen our conscious brain drop a massive ricket like the one we’re dropping in this pot and it doesn’t want us to do it again.

The interesting thing is that we won’t always know what or why it is that we’re getting these messages, these intuitions – the decision we have to make is whether to act on them or not.