(General) Verbalizing Your Thought Process?

[sethypooh21]

Something which I've been thinking about recently while not playing poker is how little actual thinking goes on when I'm actually playing poker. Now part of this is by massively multi-tabling, I'm essentially forcing myself to, as Malcolm Gladwell would put it, thin-slice most decisions. But even when I was playing fewer tables, I can seldom remember going through the exercise of trying to 'define a range' or to actually apply the analysis you might see in a post by ILP, MilesDyson or Heisenb3rg. After the hand is over, I can often reconstruct my thought process, but that exercise usually takes much longer than did the hand itself.

This never really hit home to me until I was perusing the first bit of Dr. Al's new book where he talks about the distinction between logical and instinctual players, wherein I realized that despite my background and aptitude in logical analysis (economics major in college, law school, etc...) that I'm primarily an instinctual player at the table. And I wonder if this represents a fairly systemic error I'm making - I mean, I'm pretty happy with my results, and feel like I have decent control of my play, but at the same time, maybe I'm leaving so much on the table by being sort of lazy.

On the other hand, given my background in athletics, I sort of come from the Bobby Knight school that by the time the "game" starts, the outcome has largely already been determined by the relative quality of the preparation of the participants, so in this way, I'm able to somewhat muddle through the application of concepts and strategies learned from various poker books and these here forums - I mean, I read Stox's book, and the "turn value check" line just clicked, and I started seeing spots for it at the tables right away without anything more than PAHUD/general sense reads. Or I'm just full of [censored] and am a giant luckbox.

All of which leads me in a long-winded way to my general question of how much do you all "verbalize" what you are doing when you play? Is the "empty minded" state I feel myself in when playing "well" (i.e. not tilted) standard or should I be worried about more conscious concentration? Not to get too meta or force too much self-consciousness on you all, but what mental space are you in when you feel you're playing your A game?

[milesdyson]

have you tried letting someone sweat you while you single table? try it and try to type out everything you can think of when you play a hand. i think you'll be surprised how much crap is going through your head. repetition kind of drowns out most of this thought, but it's there.

[yourface]

my brain is a lot smarter than me and it can usually be trusted to do its own thing and make the right decision. for poker specifically after several hundred thousand hands a lot of the decisions I make regarding equity and hand ranges I have analyzed a while ago and now I just recognize the situation and go with it.

I sometimes find it hard to verbalize my thought process for a hand because everything just runs through my mind all at once.

when I am faced with an unusually tough decision I slow it down and "talk" through it in my head though ("well he raised preflop and then screwplayed the flop and now blah blah blah").

edit:
explaining your decisions to a sweater or even just recording them can be a good exercise. it slows you down a bit but as miles said there is a bunch of stuff going through your mind when you make a decision that you don't always realize

[SuperWhale]

I know what you are talking about and agree with milesdyson and yourface that you are probably doing a lot of thinking that doesn't sound the voice in your head. Your brain undoubtedly recognizes a lot of the patterns, such as board texture and quickly characterizes them which will make things seem effortless.

One thing I have found though is that I have been playing better after I had someone watch me play and I explained everything that was going on. I try to get in that mind set when I play because it was so successful.

[Guruman]

when i'm playing my best poker i'm mentally verbalizing all kinds of stuff. when i'm playing weaker poker i've already made river decisions before looking at what card falls.

I think Gladwell's "blink" moments best serve my ability to determine when i'm beaten, and I'll often find that after making a "blink" fold that I can go back after the fact and find more concrete evidence that I made a good decision. The example would be that a player shifts up and bets at me on the river after calling the turn, i'll think "i'm beaten", pause a bit to be sure i'm not overracting and fold. Later I'll go back over the hand and see that yup, his preflop play totally equates with the hand he repped and that I was repping a made hand all the way and he still decided that betting was a good idea even though i was playing the hand in a way that gives no indication of a desire to fold.

Blinks also help me decide when to bluffraise big streets, but i'm clearly not well enough versed in the actual nuances of when to and when not to do that yet, so my blink calibration on those moves is still a bit off. In those instances I do better to map out the hand "verbally" in my head and make decisions based on my own logical thought. This tends to have the net effect of putting him on a hand that's showing down so it doesnt tend to produce many bluffs, which is probably safer for me in the long run. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

[octaveshift]

Great thread... why isn't this in the Psychology forum though?

FWIW, I never walkthrough a step-by-step when I am in a hand. It all happens transparently. At the end of a hand, however, I can clearly articulate every nuance of the decision.

Thin-slicing is awesome, when it works.

[sharpie]

[ QUOTE ]
Great thread... why isn't this in the Psychology forum though?

[/ QUOTE ]

This forum is tha SSSHit.

[Oink]

I def play my A game when talking out loud why I do what I do. Kinda like if I was making a video.

It sounds silly as hell and I cant get my self to do it when my girlfriend is home. Mostly because I do it in english [img]/images/graemlins/frown.gif[/img] which makes me sound like a moron being danish and all

IMO its a great way to make more concious decisions and remove some of the bad autopilot decisions. Its also a good tilt blocker because you are more aware of your emotions in some weird way.

I cant explain it more precisely but it makes me think more rational and clear. I have no idea why!

[cboevey]

I find nearly everything I do is intuitive. However that doesn't mean that intuition is not based on what you have learnt. It is merely going from A-Z without stopping at B-Y. When learning to drive you may have consciously concentrated on many different things. As you become more experienced, you can think of your day at work or girlfriend or whatever whilst weaving through heavy traffic. The conscious thought process is no longer necessary.

Learning and applying something new in a field where there is previous knowledge will take shorter to become instinctive. This is due to the mind having a frame of reference as to how to apply the new found knowledge. An example would be that proffesional ballet dancers take a few tries to learn a new routine, whereas for an amateur it would take weeks.

[Heisenb3rg]

While my posts may be verbose and throughly analytical, I am actually a very instinctual player as well.

By deeply analyzing hands away from the table, I learn which variables in a hand matter, so I minimize the thinkng at the table. If I play a similar hand later, my brain will recognize the pattern quickly and act accordingly.

The part of my brain that recognizes and adapts patterns is probabily the most active during a poker session. This is a subconcious process.

EG I see a QT7 two flush flop, my brain will instantly scan through the draws on the flop, and realize that this flop hits a lot of hands. If I was in an agressive game on the button with AK in a 4 way pot, I would instantly recognize I should check.

It's more likely constructing peices of a puzzle through visual recognition than a logical deduction of all the variables.

I think very visually with poker, just like I do with mathematics.

If you just sit there at one table and veberalized your thought process as much as possible, how much would you improve? I dunno.. Would be interesting to try.