[kotkis]

Leptyne wrote:

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A recent article in Scientific American discussing this very subject concluded that to be successful you must act in a non-rational manner. The basis of acting rationally is the assumption that your opponent is also rational and will always act in a manner that will maximize his gain. Countless studies have proven that this is not true. Even advanced game theory students, who you would think would always act in the most rational manner, as dictated by game theory, do not act rationally during some games.

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This reference is a little out of context but I assume it's talking about using exploitative vs. optimal strategies in the Game Theoretical sense. I have no problem with that, but it's important to not mistake using "exploitative" strategies as non-rational as dividus did below:


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This is what I've been saying all along, and is the main problem I have with the strictly math/logic players. All of their fancy algorithms and logic chains are based on presuppositions and assumptions that will often not hold true. Most, if not all, of the tables where they do hold true, it's because said table is populated with players who believe the same thing and play the game of poker the same way that they do (This seems obvious, but it wasn't to me.) It creates this sort of self-fulfilling prophecy that the instinctual players are a dying breed, soon to be replaced by a bunch of math nerds. It also explains why when a good LAG shows up at the table, the rational guys run for the hills.

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Your whole posts seems to assume that what we call "handreading" is strictly a quality of an instinctual player. The way I see it is that everyone relies on their intuition when it comes to gathering information about our opponents, and it's the way we use this information that separates instinctive players from more math/analytically oriented ones. For some reason you also appear to confuse tight/predictable play with being math oriented, and loose-aggressive play as being characteristics of an instinctual player when I see no reason for doing that. In fact I believe many of the wildest and most relentless winning players in todays games are math oriented (BLd vs. H@ll seems like a perfect example of what I mean).