Intuition and Confidence

Check out this short video that has some interesting titbits on intuition and confidence.

Intuition

Carlsen makes it sound easy. Trust your intuition, go with your gut and BAM, best player in the world.

But what the video doesn’t cover, is how he got there. Magnus has been immersed by chess since his childhood. I’m not saying he doesn’t have some kind of innate talent, but he became the player he is today by being obsessed with the game, day in, day out.

You have to earn the right to trust your intuition.

And in poker, you do that by doing work off the table. Poker theory, manual range breakdowns, and/or solver work… By putting in the reps off the table, you’ll sharpen your skills and intuition in game.

Training your intuition by playing poker, is very tricky. The human brain is simply not made for that. We like simple cause and effect relationships. But add randomness and we’re screwed. Winning a hand doesn’t mean you made the right play. Observing something one time doesn’t mean it’s going to be like that all the time.

Are there intuitive, exploitative, feel players with a lack of in-depth theoretical knowledge that used to crush? Definitely.

Are some of them still doing it? Maybe.

Is that the approach I recommend? Hells to the no.

I think it’s very interesting to hear crushers talk about specific exploits in certain spots. But good fundamentals are what you build those adjustments on. You need a foundation to fall back on. Once you have that, you can even find your own exploits.

I notice two kinds of intuition when I’m playing:

You encounter a spot that you have been in and studied over and over. You bet a certain hand for a certain size, and the thought process ends there. You don’t need to go over all the combos in your range, you don’t need to think about the best bet size. You just know the play and it’s not worth any extra mental energy. Usually, this occurs on earlier streets. You have some gut reaction to a spot. Bet sizing, timing… the line villain takes, tells you something even though you can’t completely articulate what and why. This really is feel player territory. And as mentioned before, it’s tricky, since we’re bad at learning from experience when randomness is involved.

The first kind is your order. It’s what allows you to grind longer hours, you don’t need to solve every hand from scratch. Some decisions should to be auto-piloted. But not all of them.

The second kind is what can occur when you are truly in the zone. You’re focused, you’re fully aware of everything that’s going on at the table. When talking about intuition or being a feel player, this is often what people mean.

I ‘M NOT NO FEEL PLAYER

A trap I fell into over a year ago, was to ignore my gut reaction in poker. I used to be completely focused on trying to emulate how the solver would play a certain situation, versus a GTO villain. But real villains are not GTO. You are not GTO. Be open to deviating, but know why.

I relearned to incorporate some intuition and creativity when playing. I will take note of my instinctive response but still think the spot through. It’s simply one of the couple of parameters that will influence my final action. My gut says A, my guesstimate of GTO for this spot would be B, my read on this player is C…

“I know what to do. I don’t have to sit there and calculate… usually I can just feel it immediately.” “If you know it immediately, then why do you sit there for half an hour?” “(laughs) I have to verify my opinion, see that I haven’t missed anything. “ A chess prodigy explains how his mind works — 60 Minutes

Being a poker player with a solid understanding of theory and GTO does not imply you just try to be a bot at the table. You are allowed to make a bet/call/fold or raise the solver wouldn’t make. You are even allowed to use “non GTO bet sizes”.

Confidence

So we established we need some kind of structure or base strategy which covers most of the spots that occur when grinding out a session. And on top of that, we have the opportunity to deviate. Actively or subconsciously.

Let’s talk about confidence now. This is what Carlsen had to say about it:

You have to trust yourself, you have to trust your instincts, and your experience accumulated over many years. If you’re not able to do that, you’re not gonna go very far. It’s better to trust your gut and get burned sometimes, than to always second guess yourself.

For you to stay in the zone, you need to be confident in your base strategy and your abilities to adjust based on extra info. Without confidence, you don’t have that order to fall back on. The chaos will mentally drain you and you won’t be able to perform the way you want to.

This can be a killer during a downswing. And that explains the recommendation you sometimes hear, of moving down and grinding back your confidence on lower stakes.

One of my friends used to joke that once you win a tournament, you become the luckbox that keeps on binking. It took me a while to realize that these repeat winners are actually on the top of their game, in the zone and confident. (Well, at least some of them) Often, you can’t force yourself into being more confident. It simply happens when you perform well.

But how can you be confident, when you make mistakes every single session?

Mistakes and Perfection

In poker, you can divide your mistakes into two different types:

You will make mistakes when you should have known better. It’s a spot you have studied before. But you forgot the correct line, or simply misplayed. You will make mistakes where you didn’t know better. You have not studied the spot before and it’s not really comparable to situations you have experience with. But with the tools available these days, in theory, it is a spot you could have mastered. If you had only prioritized it.

It can be overwhelming to realize the poker landscape is infinite. You have the tools. You have the process. But still, it’s not realistic to have solved every spot ever.

If you only play a hand when you have everything figured out, you will never play a hand in your life again.

The perfectionists among us have a hard time dealing with this.

A hard time making mistakes when we should have known better. But we’ll all keep making them since we’re only human.

A hard time knowing that there’s still so much to learn. Which there always will be, you can always go one level deeper.

So accept imperfect poker. Learn to live with this uncertainty, make the best of it and don’t strive for unattainable perfection. You can make the occasional mistake while being a good, winning player. Forgive yourself. This is, after all, a game of imperfect information that is still unsolved.

Putting it all together

We’d like to play poker in a mental state of flow. This happens with the right balance between skill and challenge. We need to have a solid base strategy and be open to occasionally deviate when an opportunity arises. Not all of these decisions are strictly conscious: our intuition saves us precious mental energy.

I’m a big proponent of actively studying poker in order to train your intuition. But I will admit some part of your intuition could be trained by playing. I don’t know how reliable that is though, as this is very tricky. Our human biases can trick us into thinking we know something we don’t.

We need confidence in both our base strategy and our ability to adjust and exploit. Without confidence, it becomes harder to trust your intuition, and every decision will cost you more energy. You will fall out of the flow state.

And finally, in order to have confidence, you need to accept imperfect poker. You will make mistakes, you will not know the optimal play… and that is all standard. Trust your ability to make an adequate decision based on the imperfect information you have available.