Poker Strategy With Roy Cooke: Developing Your Poker Instincts

You feel things, perceive things, and know things without knowing why. Something seems wrong or out of place. The thought just came to you without any conscious direction. It’s your instincts working, operating underneath your brain’s conscious level. Great poker players have excellent instincts. They develop them, and they can have a profound impact on their poker game. That said, some people’s instincts are much more accurate than others. I’ve often wondered, “Why?”

The rise of Internet poker devalued poker instincts. Players data-mined their opponents, and strategies were developed based on the statistical averages of the data. Since you couldn’t see your opponents, “feel” was less pronounced and had a smaller influence on decisions. But when you play live and you can see your opponents, sense their anxieties and fears, their confidence, their mood, and their knowledge level, developing instincts escalates in value. Instincts become more accurate, and effectively developing them can add huge value to your game.

You need to understand how the human mind works, where these intuitive thoughts come from, how they form, and how they can be developed. You need to pay attention, deliberate about your opponents’ thinking, mood, and emotions. From thinking through those observations, you’ll develop your intuitive sense, one below your consciousness that, in some individuals, can be very accurate.

Arthur Reber, a cognitive psychologist with the Fulbright Program states, “The human brain links neural connections that are repeatedly fired by stimulation. When you experience two events occurring close to each other in time and space such a connection is formed. The neurons involved undergo biological changes that make the link stronger. Over time, with many input stimuli, a strong representation of the external events is established. This system operates outside of consciousness. These representations are ‘implicit’ and they are the ones that support what we call ‘intuition’”.

That’s how the human brain creates intuition. It’s not something we are born with or something that women have and men don’t. It’s an unconscious database that our brain stores that’s developed from focusing on our past thinking and experiences.

If you want to be a great player, you’ll need to develop your intuition into accurate instincts you can trust. As a rule, we’re taught to logically think things through and that “gut feelings” are mostly based on emotions. They often are, and sometimes can be misleading. We erroneously and instinctively distrust someone who looks like someone else whom we don’t trust. And when you play poker, you don’t want to call someone just because they looked like someone who once bluffed you.

Developing accurate instincts involves making sure your brain processes the right information. First, you need to remove negative emotions and illogical thoughts from your poker instinct database. Over time, I find when talking to myself to censor my emotional reactions and replace them with reason-based alternatives. It makes the reasoned alternatives be the first thoughts. Stating to myself, “It’s just variance, I’ll win in the end,” after receiving a bad beat can remove instinctive tilt. “The odds will prevail,” is another line I use to instill a confident instinct in myself. Losing faith in oneself can be a deadly downward spiral. Creating the correct initial thought will hone your instincts.

In another context, good instincts assist players reading of their opponents’ hands and strategies. It’s accomplished by an unconscious awareness of being in tune with their emotions and thoughts. But like all instincts, they’re learned. You must both observe your opponents and think through how they are thinking and feeling to develop those unconscious instincts. Assess their knowledge level, evaluate how they react emotionally to events, and think about how they thought through a poker hand, viewing it through their eyes. Your brain will implicitly associate similar events to the ones you’ve observed, and your poker instincts will gradually develop. Keep in mind, it will be a never ending marathon, not a sprint.

While many people say always go with your gut, I still take the time to evaluate my gut feelings and judge their accuracy using my conscious thought process. I try to logically comprehend why my instincts drew the conclusion they did. Often, I can rationally connect the two. If I can’t find a plausible reason for my instincts then I contemplate if any illogical subliminal thoughts created my intuitive thought. Sometimes, the mind gets illogically subconsciously defensive when you’ve been getting beaten on, and the converse is true too. Stay in tune with your intuitive thoughts, but keep yourself real too!

That said, I have a lot of faith in my instincts and assign a lot of intuitive weight into my decisions. Of course, my intuitive sense is not always right, and sometimes I make plays that appear foolish because the association my brain connected to the current scenario was invalid. Conversely, sometimes I let my conscious mind dissuade me from my intuitive belief when my intuitive belief was correct. All that said, following my intuition has made me a lot of money over the course of my poker career.

Developing your poker instincts is going to take time. I’ve been told it takes 10,000 hours of experiencing something in order to become an expert at it. Once you get past basic strategy, instincts are what will separate you from the also-rans.

So, hone your instincts. Get to the juncture where you have faith in them. Maybe you’ll start to see where your thoughts mislead you and your “gut” was correct. I’m not saying to rely totally on instincts; you need to maintain a thought process too. Over time, they should blend to some extent! And good poker instincts are the path to poker greatness! ♠

Roy Cooke played poker professionally for 16 years prior to becoming a successful Las Vegas Real Estate Broker/Salesman. Should you wish any information about Real Estate matters-including purchase, sale or mortgage his office number is 702-376-1515 or Roy’s e-mail is [email protected]. His website is www.RoyCooke.com. Roy’s blogs and poker tips are at www.RoyCookePokerlv.com. You can also find him on Facebook or Twitter @RealRoyCooke

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