blonde poker forum

To what extent does your "instinct" or "gut feel" inform your decisions at the poker table?

Are these instincts reliable?

are they a function of sub-conscious experience, or a token of a players "natural" ability, or both?


Do you ever ignore maths and fundamentals and take an action because your inner self is screaming at you to do so?

At the risk of over extrapolating from a statistically dubious data set, at DTD over the weekend I had one situation where the 'right' play (given the action) was to fold, but my gut feel was for LOL shoveaments.

I folded and that was the wrong decision.

Someone started a thread which veered onto this topic a couple of years ago - http://blondepoker.com/forum/index.php?topic=9245.0 (http://blondepoker.com/forum/index.php?topic=9245.0)

And then there's this, shorter, one. - http://blondepoker.com/forum/index.php?topic=19032.0

Surely gut instinct is based on a combination of experience, tells and ability?  The same way as calculating pot-odds becomes second nature, so does the ability to 'read' situations.  Or so I'm told...

Its not "natural"? Something that some have an innate ability to do compared to others?

Partly it's natural ability, yes.  Same way as some salesman can sell better than others, and have a 'natural' flair for getting the customer to buy.  Experience and practice also comes into it though.

Ask Eccose about my Gut instinct....

He could not believe my fold...  ;yippee;

True, I hit trip 3's on the 3 8 9 flop.

Bet 500, Jizzem raises to 1000, I push all in for about 5k.

He folded after a good dwell with two pair, eights and nines :(

GOOD FOLD !

 >:?































 ;tightend; ;tightend; ;tightend; ;tightend; ;tightend; ;tightend; ;tightend; ;tightend;

Nit more like it........

Yes, instincts form a large part of my game, often get compliments with people saying good call or "how can you call that".

But I reckon gut feelings, instincts etc are often explained but just spotting something strange in the betting patten of the opponent on a subconscious level and are infact informed decisions.

Stu

I think there are many variables that support gut instinct. For example a person that is highly cautious and risk averse might have good instinct but might not act on it because of the risk. A person who likes the risk factor might act more on it. Both players may use the maths in general to play and have the same kind of gut instinct but some would say player 2 has better reads and observational skills because they act on their gut more? Of course collecting information either consciously or unconsciously is the foundation from which our instinct kicks in I think.

I used to play with my gut much more than I do now but I was less successful in the game. Now I use the maths and try to keep my gut reactions in check unless I'm sure I can balance that reaction with the info I have on a player. This is is much more successful and reliable for me. Interesting if I have a few alcoholic beverages my gut takes over and it's all out aggression because I'm not keeping my 'gut' in check ;)  Don't know if this is the same thing but alcohol is a variable in risk taking thus imo it's a variable on acting out on 'gut'.

In the live games I've played, my gut reaction works better but thats probably because I've built up more information about the players even if I didn't know it. Last week in a live game I did what you might think was a terrible call but my gut was screaming 'call that all in, call that all in'. I ended up winning and a couple of people said to me that it was a brave call. I just 'felt' I was going to win the hand....

Live, when playing regularly, my instinct or feel, is usually pretty good, acting on it one way or the other is another matter.

I think it's more learnt than natural i.e. sportspersons and gamers seem to make good decisions quickly, particularly the ex gamers who play god know how many at the same time online.

i've made some sick calls because of instinct. always wrong but never mind.

I rely alot on instinct when playing live.

When I am on top form, my reads on people are usually correct - practise on reading people's hole cards when you are NOT in the hand.

The more you play, the easier it becomes.

Think the best have that indefinable something....u can teach most things but feel and instinct are natural.....

so let me get this right...when people are on 'top form' 'A games' 'concentrating' then their instincts are almost always right. So when the instinct is wrong, your obviously not on your 'A game'...hmm...i like the excuse, its almost too perfect!
if I buy a chimpazee (assuming its legal) and teach it to speak (english of course) and get it into a casino (dress-up) and make it guess out loud the next coming roulette number over the course of a year...i'll bet my house on the fact that my chimp will have a period of time where it's gut instinct will be able to correctly and knowingly 'predict' a run of numbers (more than 10 in a row) and surely be on it's 'A game' proving that a chimp's gut instinct is the same if not better than human! (assuming these chimps are trained by me ONLY)
so my point is how do you separete the difference between 'gut instinct decision' and 'hit and hope'?
Some people claim they make 'world class' calls/laydowns/bluffs/re-bluffs based on pure gut natural talented instinct, well, so can a chimp! If it calls/folds/bluffs/re-bluffs at a frequency i tell it to...it'll be capable to make the exact same moves with the exact same results...if it happens to be wrong, then i dont need to tell you that even chimps trained by me can be not on their 'A game' from time to time!
with the study of phycology and behaviour of humans, you'll find that we tend to remember things we WANT to remember and forget things that are not useful, hence the re-call of the x numbers of amazing calls/etc that i've done in the past. Has anyone bothered counting the sucess rate of these so called 'gut instinct' decision? Or bothered to calculate the number of hands u've played and the percentage rate we were able to employ these instincts? if you play online over 1 year you should have played at least 200,000 hands, live probabily 1/5 of that. So what percentage should gut instinct be out of all the hands you've played to prove that it even exists? and not just a completely random guess(sometimes, if ur a decent player, it might be a carefully calculated guess) that happened to yield the result and in a situation you were dreaming of?
ARE YOU SURE YOUR GUT INSTINCT'S SUCESS RATE IS BETTER THAN THAT OF A CHIMP? if not you should never play poker ever again! :p

I will take that bet

bet is taken.
approximate value of my house is about 200k at the moment.
take a couple of years for me to get a good bankroll to be able to buy a chimp.
then a couple million years for the chimp to evolve to be able to adjust its mouth to pronouce english
by then chimps should be legal to enter a casino.
then its just down to the chimp's gut instinct predictions to shout out more than 10 winning numbers in a row
with the inflation of housing prices during this period...
you got yourself a bet in excess of a trillion GBP
which is the biggest bet ever recorded!
i cant wait! :D

one number per spin, forget the monkey, you can choose them ;)

i would like to kindly decline the offer and insist on the original one.
i do not the natural gut instinct to be able to defy the odds of
4,808,584,372,417,849 to 1 to complete the task.
My highly trained english speaking Chimp named Helmuth Junior The Third, would be perfectly capable of achieving that task relying solely on its instinct :D

Thats a bit of a generalisation - I said it, that does not make it "people".

And in your analagy you are describing poker as a game of chance, not skill.

Of course I get it wrong now and again - and yes I remember those times as well.

I did notice that when you were on my cash table on Sunday, when those 3 players went all in you guessed their hands correctly. Was very impressed!

As for my gut feeling during games, this is weird, but if i'm in a hand with someone who I consider to be a good player, I will automatically think they have a good hand, whereas if i'm playing someone who I consider to be weak I think they have a poor hand and am more likely to try and bully them. Maybe that's where I'm going wrong because in reality, the better player is probably bluffing and the weaker player is probably holding the nuts!!

when i started i noticed that around 80%-90% of the time i was ranging someones hand, making a hero call or analysing any given situation i was wrong so i didnt try to improve i just started to do the opposite of what i thought was the right play, thats when i started playing for a living.

This is a subject that interests me greatly. I have always been interested in the workings of the mind and this is probably why I was captivated by poker immediately. They say that the brain is like an iceberg in so much as what we know about it is the smaller part that floats above the surface.

What I do know is that instinct at the poker table is not some magical gift that comes from nowhere. The brain absorbs and stores a stunning amount of info, the vast majority of which you are not consciously aware of. When you tap into this unconscious info it may feel like your gut talking but it is coming from your mind.

I think your instincts are quite basic, should I fight or flight? But your mind is deeply complex and provides an answer to this question from every tiny bit of info you've ever stored. Example: Ten years ago Jane was in the bank when it was robbed at gunpoint. Today she took her car to the mechanic and when he came over she fled the garage in panic, but didn't know why. In fact, the guy who robbed the bank 10 years ago was also a mechanic, she had unconsciously caught his scent, and the brain had associated it with terrible danger.

Poker allows you to tap into all your experience to provide an instinctive answer and then your logic allows you to reason it out. Because a chimp can't match a human's logic it will always fall short of the mark when it comes to decision making. And predicting the random spin of a number is never going to be instinctive, how can it be?

Different types of players rely on different blends of instinct and logic. I find tournament players rely more on feel with a hint of logic and cash players favour the maths approach with a hint of feel.

But allowing your brain to absorb information is vital if you want to encourage feel, and your massively complex mind will absorb much much more information than you will ever be aware of. This is why I think wearing ipods at the table is so very ridiculous

I'm sure I've posted something similar on a thread recently, but 'instinct' is a massive part of my game, which I think is why I'm much more successful live than online.  I'm not talking about 'instinct' in the true sense though, it's more about getting a feel for the other players at the table - there's just so much information to be picked up while you're sat round a poker table.  A huge amout of that information is picked up subconciously to an extent (i.e. I'm not actively or methodically seeking/logging the information) that I can see why some people say that those great calls/folds they have made are down to instinct or gut feeling - I think it's more to do with how well we read people, read between the lines etc, which is something people with a more empathetic nature will naturally be better at I suppose.

Clever chimp:

http://www.greatapetrust.org/player/video.php?vid=11

http://www.roulette-uk.com/aboutus.php

there already is a monkey his name is david

btw lol at that site

grrr someone's already started training chimps...guess they beat me to the thought of amazingly intelligent chimps!
I didnt write anything to offend anyone, and obviously most of what I wrote was complete shiat and should not be digested.
Although recently I saw a documentry showing just how much more powerful a chimp's memory is compare to human..
I enjoy over-thinking and analysis, and that is meant to make people think about what they are actually doing rather than just doing it.
not that I dont trust instinct, I just prefer a sound logical and mathematically plosible decision...

most animals are born with instincts and they KNOW things before they are taught...that cannot be said about a human baby, they are as stupid as they come! We learn through experience, when they allow this experience to drift away and let 'instinct' take over....u all know what happens to the other guy in the pub!
bananas for all! :D