Finding your poker intuition

Poker intuition used to be viewed as a mystical thing that the really top players had and mere mortals didn’t. Doyle, Hellmuth and the rest would stare you down, look into your soul and know your A-K had missed and call you down. Then along came the computer generation and started to demystify the game, proving over millions of hands the correct mathematical way to play. Reading souls becomes a little irrelevant when you can prove that there’s an unexploitable way to play in a situation.

Logic vs Intuition

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 beat.

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.