Real Poker: Feel it More Often

“Poker is a game about people, played with cards.”

It’s an old school saying, full of wisdom that’s still true today. It’s especially true of no-limit hold’em.

However, internet poker transformed the game, partly dehumanizing it. Poker became a game of data-mining and average hand range analysis vs. hands. And while that knowledge still has application when transferred to live games, live poker is still primarily a game of people.

The best live poker players are highly intuitive. They sense inconsistencies in their opponent’s logic and psychological impulses. They feel the bluffs, the weak calls, the strong hands of their opponents, often without even knowing why. They trust their “gut,” and they should, because their gut is highly accurate. We all have an intuitive sense, in varying degrees of effectiveness, but many fail to consciously use it or develop it. Those with highly effective gut feelings are mostly correct because they represent the processing of complex information that the logical portion of your brain cannot process.

When finely honed based on practice and experience, intuition is a big edge. Good feel or intuitive players understand and use analytical thinking, but also know when to listen to their instincts. They use both and know when to utilize each one. They sense when a situation departs from their opponents’ standard thought or emotional process and adjust their analytics to the given situation.
 
Many people’s guts are inaccurate, due to either lack of instinct or incorrect instincts. For example, a paranoid personality will have a different perception of an event than one who perceives things realistically. Same with a narcissist, optimists vs. pessimists, etc.! Understanding what makes people tick goes a long way in determining their thoughts.

Many, including myself, are often guilty of second guessing intuition. When I have an intuition and revert back to my conscious thoughts, it’s often an error. My intuition is a better processor of information than my conscious analytical mind. I try to compartmentalize the differences between my thoughts and intuitions and weigh each, defining my thoughts as the conscious thoughts and my intuitions as the unconscious ones. I have a lot of faith in my intuitions and assign a lot of weight in my decisions to them. I’m not always right by any means, but there is no question they add value to my poker game.

Developing awareness is a fundamental to developing feel. You must be able to focus for long periods of time, keep your mind on the game, think about events, continuously sense people’s reactions to events, and correlate events. This will develop both conscious and sub-conscious thoughts relating to your awareness. Practice this constantly at the table. The more you observe, the more you’ll recognize things with your subconscious mind that your conscious mind would never recognize.

As both your conscious and unconscious mind learn from past events, your gut will inform you when events don’t correlate to past events. It may be a physical or a mental change. That intuition is an instinctive mindset; created from millions of years of evolution. You subconsciously are aware when an event doesn’t correlate to past experiences. That said, when you sense non-correlation, you need to ask yourself why the change, and adjust your strategy to the situation.

Most people are guided by habitual thinking. The majority of the changes people make are guided by emotion, not reason. That said, some changes are based on intellectual thought. If people change their standard MO, you need to ask yourself why they changed. Is there a past event that changed them? Is it emotional? Logical? If they’ve changed a habitual thought pattern, there is a reason for it.

People recall more recent and highly impressionable events more sharply. It’s important to develop your intuitive senses through their eyes and thought process, not yours. People see things and react differently than you do, focus on how they processed the situation, not how you did or would! Of important note, the human brain remembers things the same way they last thought about it, not the situation that may or may not have existed. Reflect on how they thought about it.

Everybody is born with some intuition, but we differ immensely in our ability to develop it and to trust it. Like most other skills, it takes time and hard work to develop it well, and even more work to know when to trust it. It’s something that is absorbed over time through human interaction and awareness of both of self and others. Think about people as they play poker. How do they view themselves? Others? What psychological issues govern their thinking?

It’s not a perfect science. And it’s NOT a substitute for knowing correct strategy. Develop both. Your subconscious mind is a source of great analysis. It’s a sense of knowing, developed from millions of years of evolution and awareness of self and surroundings. Get in tune with your intuition. Bring it to the center stage of your mind.

And once you’ve developed your intuition and trust it, it will do wonders for your poker bankroll. ♠