How Do Non-Rational Players Succeed in Poker?

[ZeeJustin]

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ZJ,

"This is probably because very few schools of poker look at opponents timing when making a decision"

Just about every good player I know takes bet timing into account in their decision-making, both live and online.

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Yes. I'm simply saying it's not something that is commonly taught.

[ZeeJustin]

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okay but were caught up in the discussion of whether or not it was good to let subconscious thought process make the decision, ie zoning out or putting the decision out of your mind a sec, as in requins example. i argued that this was foolish.

in your example, in my mind would go like this: I feel like i should check (gut reaction). then i think consciously, he's not folding TT, so i should check, and then i check.

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For the most part I agree. I'm not advocating making decisions without thinking. When the information such as "my opponent has TT" comes to you, you must then logically decide what the best course of action is against TT.

[Azalin]

Very good post.

[Guido]

Hi ZJ,

Very nice post. Only thing I can add is that after I started playing less my gut feeling started getting worse, it isn't as good as it used to be. I played for about 2 years full time and my unconscious decisions became better and better. It's been about 1.5 years now that I played a lot and when I play now, I notice that my unconscious decisions are less accurate. I feel that the math part is at about the same level, maybe just a little less. So I feel that the more I play the better my unconscious decision become. Like someone else said, these situation don't come up very often. I'm still a good grinder [img]/images/graemlins/laugh.gif[/img].

Thanks,

Guido

[Ryendal]

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i dont think i underestimate it, i think that i know its limitations.

grand masters in chess can feel the right move most of the time simply because they are so experienced and can just tell what works and what doesn't, but when something tricky comes up they must buckle down and make some serious calculations. i believe poker is the same way.



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IMO, it is wrong. Analyse in only here to refute the feeling.

When a very strong player has to choose between his analyse conclusion and his feeling, do you really think he chooses his analyse ?
It is one of the hardest thing to choose, when you can't find any logic to justify a move ( you think, 15mn, 30 mn, but you don't find ( And more importantly ,of course, you are unable to refute your feeling move, because the position is too complexe or whatever ) while your feeling shout you to play the move.

[Enzyme]

I don't really like the idea to try to classify people as "logical" and "feel-based". Just because some players are not very good at "externalizing" their thought process, doesn't mean they are not utilizing logic in their decision-making / analysis. They still think about hands afterwards and draw logical conclusions, even though they might be using "internal" language for that logic.

I also think that some people who consider themselves "logical" might not be aware of how much of their decision are actually unconscious. Doing logic is pretty hard for most humans and requires focus, so people naturally develop a thought process for similar tasks that goes on without much effort.

IMO advocating on relying more on unconscious thought process is a bit misguided. It's true that it is very fast and efficient in a lot of cases, however, it can also easily be misleading. When one is presented with a problem that is described in more or less familiar terms, brain usually has unconscious answer immediately. Very simple example would be this: ball and a bat cost 1.10 together, price of a bat is a dollar more than price of the ball. How much is the ball? A large percentage of people, including pretty intelligent ones, immediately answer .10, even though if you consider it for a second, it is clearly wrong answer. Kahneman and Tversky did some work on decision-making in uncertain situations and they showed that people often make wrong decisions using their experience/gut feeling, even when they are presented with significant statistical data to actually make a right decision. Kahneman actually got a Nobel prize in Economics for this. One of the examples I remember is a study of medical schools accepting students. In cases when they interviewed prospective students, they actually made more mistakes in accepting wrong students comparing to times when they made decisions just on the basis of applications. So your immediate or not immediate feeling on something might easily be off, especially if you consider that you don't really know how is it affected by a million factors like environment, mood, bad experience, etc.

It really should not hurt anybody to stop and think through the hand to see if you can derive some additional info you missed while you are were in "feel" mode. It only should lead to better decisions. Suggesting that it stops your instincts from development is just wrong, because you really can't stop them from development as you cannot turn your unconscious processes off. More situations you face and more you think about them, better your instincts are. Unless we are talking about some fileds that are very hard to describe in terms of human reasoning and logic (timing, pattern recognition), most of your instincts are results of previous conscious efforts to solve problems. You will be faced with enough complex or confusing situations when you just cannot make a logical conclusion (especially in restricted time) and have to rely on your instincts, so I really can't see a point in advocating specifically trying to turn your conscious thinking off. It can actually hurt you big time. For instance, getting caught up in the "flow" of the aggressive SH game is a slippery slope that results in tilt way too often.

I can ramble on incoherently, but I just want to say this. If I had to make a guess, I would say developing conscious reasoning and analyzing skills is much more important in most fields involving decision-making, since its something you can actually control and operate consistently and it still helps your unconscious development. If you want, "trusting your instincts" is a conscious choice to make a decision based on your experience/feel in situations you find most suitable for it (and it seems like quite a few people who already posted in this thread made this choice and aware of it).

[RiverFenix]

Im not sure if this has been mentioned yet but you should submit this to the 2p2 magazine. Its only worth $300 (I think), but a lot of other 2p2ers would get to read an excellent post.

[fnord_too]

One of the things you do in math and physics (and probably every other math or science discipline) is to build your mathematical or physical intuition. Basicly, that means doing a lot of problems or proofs until your instincts about what the form of the solution or whatever will be becomes reliable. That is sort of the function these forums serve for a lot of players: you read hands by better players and at some point you get a good intuition of the play these better players would make in a similar spot. Of course, especially in NL, there are some big drawbacks.

One thing anyone could do if to really improve their game, and I certainly need to do this, is do lots and lots of equity problems. Look at hands and a given board and go through how that hand fares against specific hand ranges with various pot sizes in and out of position. This stuff is very tedious and takes a lot of time, but I believe if you do this sort of thing, you will build up a very strong equity intuition (actually, EV intuition, since you will be considering more than just situations where the hand is shown down). You still have the hard job of putting someone on a range of hands, but you will not be nearly as likely to make a mistake given the range of hands you put someone on. That is, even if I know your range of hands exactly, I can still make big mistakes because I do not have a good instincts about the math of the situation. This also includes looking at things like the liklihoods of the various lines that could play out (taking into account how each action can change the picture. Basicly I am saying that going through lots of notional hands against lots of ranges and gaming them out should go a very far way to improving your game.

[derosnec]

someone give an example of a play determined by the subconcious? so far, everything seems to come from the conscious. if i'm postflop versus tag or lag and s/he bets X on Y flop, my decision is based on the conscious. yeah, you might say "well you've seen a X size bet roughly 2,000 times on such a flop by a person with ABC stats, so your subconcious gices you a 'feel' of whether you're ahead or behind." but i'd argue that that "feel" is still coming from the conscious.

(not that any of this matters in the small stakes games i play where the Corky crowd will push/call down with anything)

[fnord_too]

Dero,

Ever been multi-tabling and play a hand (other than an insta fold) without even really realizing it? KKF has talked about this before in the psych forum. IIRC correctly, he said something along the lines of he had a phone call. Realized his stack on one table was bigger than it had been a couple moments before. He looked at the hand history, and said it was not a trivial hand, but he had played it without even realizing or remembering it.