The point in me posting this thread was to try and see if anybody else trusts gut instincts like this and lets it overcome a glaringly +EV spot, or do you ALWAYS go with it as it works out in the very end?
Yes, all the time and please continue to do-so otherwise the experience you gain by playing poker becomes totally sterile, we always mock the "old school" guys who say they are "feel players" but there is a LOT of merit to how someone with experience "feels" about a situation, you've played tons of poker hands and each one you play you learn a little something, or notice something and often you don't even realize what it is but then later on the same thing happens and your intuition spikes.
there is a great reference in "the mental game of poker" about this exact thing, Rob put it in a post once
The best way I can think of explaining this is by using an example. In Jared Tendler's "The Mental Game of Poker" he talks about 4 levels of competence that can be broadly used to generalise development in any discipline/skill/game etc/. These are:
Unconscious Incompetence - You don't know what you don't know, complete beginner.
Conscious Incompetence - You've become conscious of what you don't know, you begin to understand where and how you need to improve.
Conscious Competence - After countless hours of study you become skilled/have had enough experience to gain skill. You need to think about what you've learned...otherwise you return to being incompetent.
Unconscious Competence - At this level you've learned something so well that it is now totally automatic and requires no thinking. In poker this could be anything from folding 23o utg to understanding why someone is exploitable when they open x amount of hands and cbet y board with z frequency. In the book he refers to this as "The Holy Grail of Learning".
The point of this is that in order to reach a higher level of thought you need to first establish the thought process over hours and hours of study and practice, only then does it become second nature. When it becomes second nature you can focus you energy on other intricacies of whatever it is you are doing. In poker this might be fake tells, reading other people when not in a hand, developing strategies and adjustments to your ranges when not in a hand etc. etc. This imo, is what seperates a good player from a great player.
I could write an entire essay on the subject of poker and learning and how it is applicable to every aspect of you life, exercise, dating/relationships, investing, business etc etc but that would be beyond the scope of a poker forum discussion and take a lot of time. Instead I'l give you one of my favourite examples from the book "Blink" by Malcom Gladwell. In it, an experienced firefighter uses unconscious competence to save lives. I don't recall it word for word but here is a paraphrase:
"A researcher tells the story of a firefighter in Cleveland who answered a routine call with his men. It was in the back of a one-and-a-half story house in a residential neighborhood in the kitchen. The firefighters broke down the door, laid down their hose, and began dousing the fire with water. It should have abated, but it didn't. As the fire lieutenant recalls, he suddenly thought to himself, "There's something wrong here," and he immediately ordered his men out. Moments after they fled, the floor they had been standing on collapsed. The fire had been in the basement, not the kitchen as it appeared. When asked how he knew to get out, the fireman thought it was ESP, which of course it wasn't. What is interesting to Gladwell is that the fireman could not immediately explain how he knew to get out. From what Gladwell calls "the locked box" in our brains, our fireman just "blinked" and made the right decision. In fact, if the fireman had deliberated on the facts he was seeing, he would have likely lost his life and the lives of his men.
It took well over two hours of questioning for the fire lieutenant to piece together how he knew to get out. (First, the fire didn't respond as it was supposed to; second, the fire was abnormally hot; third, it was quiet when it should have been noisier given the heat.)"
I think its a great example because it basically shows how you can make completely non-stnd moves based on an instinct, i had a hand i put in my vegas hand thread where I decided to chk flop, cal turn and chk river back on a pretty dry board with Aces cos I got randomly spooked by the way the villain checked the flop, plenty of time I've ignored these instincts and often I've regretted it, a lot of the time as well I chose to follow them when i was actually wrong, but always feel pretty satisfied when I chose to follow my intuition over a "stnd" play as i feel like one of the things that makes me a good player is all the experience I have and to ignore it in spots would be a waste of that asset.
That being said, make sure you can distinguish between a genuine gut instinct you have and a "spazzy" or "nitty" tendency that you've developed and disguising as a genius soul read (not saying that is what happened here at all) but I think with some results orientation this could be easy to do.
As for this hand, because we don't have 100% of the information you had at the time all I can say is i would have c/r the river as you played it, but as a general strategy I think c-betting the flop is far far better than c/calling you kinda rep a BETTER hand than you have on the flop by c/calling and not c-betting, but being OOP this is not going to be that effective, also Mitch makes a sick point
If your not gonna raise here, anyone whos decent is gonna realise your massively polarised whenever you raise the river and will crush your soul.
good players will pick this up super fast - but you can adjust once everyone has seen your hand by raising rivers thiner for value in the future, but bluffs and genuine value bets are gonna get owned pretty hard
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