In his seminal work Super System Doyle Brunson touched 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.
Logic vs intuition
However, while poker intuition used to be viewed as a mystical thing that the really top players had and mere mortals didn’t, the internet generation have done a lot to discredit this sort of thinking. The ruthlessly analytical computer kids have demystified the game, proving over millions of hands that there's a correct mathematical way to play. Reading souls becomes a little irrelevant when you can prove there’s an unexploitable way to play in a given situation.
So is there any use for poker intuition at all? The answer is a very qualified yes. It’s definitely true that the best way to make poker profit is to study the fundamentals of the game and analyse hands and situations rather than trusting in your instinct and intuition. In fact you can rise very high in the poker world by standing on the shoulders of giants – if you’re smart enough, talent is now optional because of the knowledge is out there for you. Clear rational thinking and using techniques like assigning ranges and pot odds will beat acting on hunches.
However if we view intuition as our poker experiences feeding back to us rather than talent or magic then it is an important part of our ability as a player. After all, one of the advantages the internet generation has is the many hundreds of thousands of hands and situations they’ve seen. That may allow clear quick thinking in the moment but they may also provide that instinctual feeling that our hand is good or that we’re beaten.
Getting an edge
Critically, poker is still a game of people and playing opponents. Assigning a range to an opponent’s hand is a vital skill but the range you assign and how it’s weighted will be down to your knowledge of that opponent and how he’s acting in this hand at this moment. Our fundamentals of the game will give us good decision-making tools but poker isn’t and will never be played in a vacuum. Instincts honed over many thousands of hands can give us an extra edge. Some things in poker will never be reduced to a formula because the game is about people and our people reading. So when that guy you’ve been three-betting remorselessly finally makes a four bet and you’re asking yourself whether he really picked up Aces or is frustrated and trying to ‘make a stand’, your poker intuition may have the answer.
Backing your hunches
Playing poker is about making correct decisions in a limited amount of time. It’s a strange game because it’s definitely possible to be a far better player from the rail than in the heat of battle. The question is, can you bring all of your poker knowledge into the moment you have to make the decision? Top players, even the most mathematical, must act partly on instinct in the moment they make their decision.
It might be their analysis away from the table that is brought to bear in the moment (because they’ve thought about these situations before) but it is also their snap judgment about the specific player that makes their decision.
Judgement day
The difference between an okay player and a really good one is they never fail to back their judgment. How often have you heard a player say something like ‘I know you don’t have much’ before folding? If you know he doesn’t have much, raise his face off! Or how often do you see players time down their hole time bar knowing they’re beat before making a ‘crying call’ only to be shown the nuts they always suspected their opponent had.
Pot odds may dictate you can make a call but when you know your beat you pot odds can be hundreds to one, you’d still be burning money. The difference is good players always back their judgement. First of all they’ll analyse a situation to try and get the right play, then they’ll combine it with their reads and intuition and go with it. Older players always like to talk about ‘heart for the game’ and ‘bottle’ but these are red herrings to try and make the game sound like a test of male prowess. In fact all you have to do is back your judgments.
When you’re at the poker table, make cold calculating analysis first. Combine that with your poker intuition about the player and situation. And when you’re about to pull the trigger, always back your reads. After all, this isn’t mysticism, this is us using all those thousands of hours of play our subconscious is feeding back to us – the least we can do is listen.