Mind Over Poker

When it comes to playing hunches, hindsight tends not to be 20/20. Rather, hindsight becomes distorted with images of that full house that could have been yours if you had just played that 6-3 offsuit that you had a feeling about. Or, more likely, that hindsight gets completely blown away by a made gutshot straight when you just knew that four-outer was going to come on the river.

These are the hands we tend to remember that reinforce our notion that our hunches often prove true. When that gutshot straight doesn’t materialize, we blame the poker gods and curse our bad luck, but we don’t doubt our hunch. Of course, if we are playing objective, emotionally detached poker, we should be making good decisions based on the information available at the time such decision is made. Your potential outs are certainly a factor to consider, but your decision should be made based on the actual probability of those outs, not some enhanced probability based on a hunch.

Now, I am not going to totally disavow the notion of playing hunches. If it helps you mix up your play or gives you the confidence to semibluff once in a while, that can be very helpful. Just keep it in perspective and use it to help you mix up your play, rather than as an excuse for erratic or loose play. The bottom line is that when it comes to hunches, you’re best off totally ignoring them when it comes to visions of what card is going to roll off the deck. If you’re the type who likes to play hunches, you shouldn’t worry about mixing up your play. Instead, you should learn to play objective poker and dispel those hunches whenever they creep into your conscious (or even subconscious) state.

Most of us probably play them more than we care to admit. They are a leak in our game and should be eliminated.

There is another area of poker, however, where most of us may not play our hunches nearly enough. What I’m talking about is sizing up our opponents. I’m sure that there are plenty of times when we recognize weakness in our adversaries, yet we do nothing because we don’t have any kind of hand ourselves. It’s hard to exercise the power of your convictions when you are holding nothing but two unpaired cards with no draws. Yet, these “hunches” that we have about our opponents are much more real than the hunches we have about what cards will come.

Hunches about our opponents are based on observation, experience, and how the hand is playing out. If you are the type of person who studies opponents, these aren’t hunches at all. These are exploitable situations that you should be taking advantage of. It is why you should be playing the game. Think about it. In the first hunch scenario that I discussed, you’re calling off your chips based on some crazy belief that you can actually foresee what card will come off the deck. In the second hunch scenario, you can raise your opponent off a hand if your perceived observation is correct. Which one appears to be the better bet? Yet, most beginning players tend to be much more comfortable with playing the former hunch than the latter.

If you feel compelled to play hunches, at least choose those hunches that are based on something more tangible than a feeling.

David Apostolico is the author of Compete, Play, Win: Finding Your Best Competitive Self. You can contact him at [email protected].