How Do Non-Rational Players Succeed in Poker?

[ZeeJustin]

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Excellent post ZJ. I don't have anything to add right now.

Do you recommend the book? Was it a difficult read?

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It's a relatively easy read.

Personally I found the book fascinating. It is basically about ways of applying psychology in order to succeed. A lot of it relates to self-help in a sense, achieving the results you want and all that nonsense, but it has a very strong scientific base.

The book is also great to help understand other people, and why they react the ways they do in different situations. Especially for social-business settings, the stuff in teh book is very helpful.

For a lot of the stuff in the book, I was thinknig, "that's interesting, but how can I apply that?" But after I was finished reading the book, I thought I had a much better understanding on how important psychology is to many different kinds of social situations.

So yes, I do recommend this book.

[Ansky]

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Yet nobody that post much here has been super succesful playing the highest stakes online (50/100+).

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aba20, thebruiser500,

prob others. I know giftofgab used to post

[ZeeJustin]

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In Nl and Pl games math is important, but not nearly as useful as it is in Limit IMO(oviuosly).

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I can't agree with this. High stakes limit games, especially 50/100 and above play so incredibly differently from 10/20 and below. They get extremely more aggressive with players making extremely thin value bets and constant bluffs. If you don't have any hand reading skills, you will die in these games.

[MDMA]

Wow, great post. As for me, I'm without doubt one of the "first" group, i.e the logical-intelligent guys.

First of all for those who don't know me, I've never played a A LOT of poker; I'm quite convinced that I have probably played less than anyone else. I came in contact with the game 1.5 years ago, and I have never played a lot like most players. Instead, I basically learnt the thinking processes of real high-stakes poker by sweating my friends for hours and hours (even before I even began to play at all myself), by discussion and most of all, by just thinking about the game a lot, and thinking about a lot of situations, and how people usually approach them, stuff like that. Thus, I've learned the game in a very academical way, and mostly on my own, not through a lot of trial and error and by havings lots of experience; I have less than most, but, without trying to sound like I'm bragging or anything, I just found myself learning the game very easy, I've always been strong in math, but I quickly realized, and this is basically I actually started watching 50/100 before I started playing like 2/4 myself, that potodds/making draws pays etc and stuff like that has very little to do with how you approach situations on higher stakes, and that actually thinking about how your opponent think is that much more crucial, I realized this after seeing my friends call big bets with inside straightdraws, only to hit a pair and on the end call down a bluff. I learned the game pretty much entirely backwards compared to everybody else I knew, and for some reason that worked way much better than anything else I could imagine. I initially read a few books, but quickly realized that most of them were pretty much [censored], at least for NL, and that they would NEVER be able to explain even remotely close to how the play of real high-stakes poker is working, and how the poker minds at these levels think. Since then I of course have been playing, but once again, not NEARLY as much as most others.

What this my whole "poker/self-eduction" has left me with is basically quite the opposite to how you seem to feel in a lot of situations ZJ; I very rarely use my subconscience and just go with feel; I feel nearly all my decisions are basic on logic and active processes made in my conscious mind, except when it is just not possible, like a few difficult situations that basically only occurs at the very highest tables between the very best players.

The hand samo posted earlier about calling an overbet with a pair of fours is such a hand where frequencies pretty much goes out the window, and Taylor Caby explained it when he said you just cannot beat Mahatma by changing frequencies and stuff, you just have to OUT-THINK him, and this is where the first point when my subconscious mind comes into play for me, I feel. Basically, when frequencies for calling and stuff like that cant be quantified, and are basically meaningless, when no ordinary logic is applicable and where no argument can be made mathemathically, that is where the subconscious takes over for me. I don't feel this happens often; most of the time I just make quick deductions from how the hand played out, our history etc and most likely find the best play, or the best range of plays, and just use that, of course, I feel GOOD about taking this decisions as well, so I'm not struggling against some subconscious-pull that wants me to do something else. I think in most cases, if you just approach the problem at hand in the right way, you can often find the correct play by conscious reasoning, but there are some situations, like the two I mentioned above (i.e samos hand and battling mahatmas overbets, how often you should call, when you should call etc), where you just basically cannot even explain to yourself why a call feels correct or not.

I think, in those situations, the subconscious intelligence that ZJ is talking about is made clear.

I mean, I'm only thinking consciously in more difficult situations; most of the situations that occur in poker has been entered into my subconscious mind as well, and are just routine, I know them to be wrong and I don't have to explain it to myself, it goes by routine; this goes for the vast majority of situations and poker, and that is basically why I've never liked grinding; to learn all these fairly common situations took me very little time, and since these situations make up like 97% of our decisions during a session, that is how I simply cannot motivate me either, except for money that is. I think this is also why a lot of people burn out, by making nearly all decisions just routinem, which they become by entering your unconscious mind, you get less and less intellectual stimulance out of playing.

Edit: Just realized I pretty much made no apparent point at all in what I wrote, lol, I guess I just felt like writing a bit and got inspired by this really great read, and a little bit how it related to me.

[ZeeJustin]

I completely forgot about this moment until just now. The subconscious mind strikes again!

Roughly two years ago, I was sitting in my dorm at Maryland, and my friend Justin Simpson was watching me multi-table $200+15 SNGs. I was telling him some of my thought processes, and on one hand, something came out of my mouth, and I had no clue where it came from.

It was a hand during the first blind level (relatively deep stacks), and we were on the river. He checked to me, and I said out loud, "Does he fold tens if I bet here? Nah." I checked behind with my no-pair, and he took the pot with his tens.

What struck me as odd, was that I wasn't concentrating on the hand at all. I was looking at other tables and explaining stuff to Justin while this hand was going on. Despite that, I somehow knew he had TT.

I kind of shrugged that situation off. In hindsight, I wish I would have really stopped to think about how I came up with my opponent's hand. I would probably be a better player for it today.

[cero_z]

Hi Justin,

Good post. I just want to comment on this:

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However, these poor fundamentals [exhibited by the "feel" players] are often overshadowed by expert hand-reading skills that allow these players to do well in high stakes games.

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It's not just that, IMO. It also can help them that until these fundamental flaws are well-understood by their good opponents, the flaws make them unpredictable in a way that can be profitable. I recall a post a while back about 2 spots where H@ll called giant amounts of his stack with 53 (suited, I think), clear mistakes. He got tremendously lucky in those pots, I think, drawing out. However, there have to have been other situations where he'd get into a spot with a hand far weaker than his skilled opponent would ever believe he could hold, given the prior action, and thus could successfully bluff his way out. To H@ll (or whoever), this could just be a consequence of having "luckily learned" that he could draw profitably with many hands that are clearly losers in reality.

Additionally, it's a tilt trigger for many logical players to see a player who "knows better" get lucky when making an obviously horrible play. So, the non-logical players benefit from the ways that their opponents incorrectly adjust to the idiosyncracies that were part of the "lucky learning" process.

[EmpireMaker2]

I couldnt even pass a college algebra class (freshman year) I did very poor on the ACT, and have 1.8 GPA but somehow i do good at poker IDK.

[aggie]

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Additionally, it's a tilt trigger for many logical players to see a player who "knows better" get lucky when making an obviously horrible play. So, the non-logical players benefit from the ways that their opponents incorrectly adjust to the idiosyncracies that were part of the "lucky learning" process.


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Yea, this can't be emphasised enough. One of my favorite things to do (usually when i'm drunk) is sit down in a donkfest 2-5NL game and go nuts for a while. I'll do crazy stuff like make it $100 straight PF every pot for a few orbits. I then back off a little and just limp in and call every single pot and play well post flop. It's amazing how badly the 2-5 opponents adjust to this. I act like a fool for 15 minutes and they try to give me their money for hours afterwards. They do crazy stuff like get all their money with 3rd pair against me when it's clear that i'm folding most flops. These aren't horrible players and they know how to play ABC poker but they have no idea how to adjust to somebody playing over the top

[Erik Blazynski]

Contrary to what many will say, there is no truely random number generator. Many sites use player input such as mouse movements to determine a random seed. I will state that it is my opinion that one's unconscious mind knows what's coming. I can't tell you how many times I have been all in, in a tourney with WAY the best of it and I can predict with a great deal of accuracy the method with which I will get screwed, I can call it out "runnner runner flush" and bam there it is.

-Blazman

[Keyser.]

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Very nice post. Does anyone else do this when faced with a tough decision? I go to each of my other tables and deal with whats going on there, maybe pop up my poker tracker browser, anything to distract myeslf from consciously thinking about the hand. Then when my timer is almost done I go back and find the answer to my decision is in my head. I agree 100%, I think the unconscious mind is a much better decision maker in poker than the conscious mind.

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I do the exact same thing. I've thought about why I do that but could never figure it out. Justin's explanation makes a lot of sense. Nice post.