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Does poker intuition have any value in the modern, math-based game? Does it even exist? And if so, what precisely is it?

Old-school poker players would often talk about “gut feeling” when reaching tough poker decisions or plotting mind-bending bluffs. During the poker boom of the early 2000s, it became fashionable to invoke “soul reading” when a player accurately determined their opponent’s hole cards, although in most cases this was more of a meme than an acknowledged poker technique.

The topic has a somewhat spotted history. In Super System I, the late Doyle Brunson staunchly advocated for ESP as the underlying paranormal phenomenon that produced gut feeling. When the second edition of the classic text was published, that particular claim had been purged, perhaps by an editor who felt such woo-woo ideas would harm sales.

Nevertheless, it was still the experience of many strong poker players that they “just knew” sometimes if an opponent was bluffing, without knowing how they knew.

Two Facets Of Poker Intuition

Before we delve into the details of poker intuition, and how it can help (or hurt) our poker game, let us give a loose working definition of what we are describing.

First, and fortunately for those of us of a skeptical persuasion, there are well-established neurological mechanisms that can produce the gut feeling one sometimes gets playing poker. Roughly speaking, the brain detects a far broader data stream than we can consciously process. In this sense, one can think of poker intuition as the subconscious giving a conscious mind a little tickle that can help us reach an inspired poker decision apparently out of nowhere.

More mundane, but equally important, is the poker intuition that stems from our experience playing the game. While GTO studies have led to the notion that poker is a solved game, every session will confront us with situations in which the details are novel. Thus even the most advanced, math-based poker players will frequently have to interpolate between points of a known strategy. To do so well requires a poker intuition born from study and experience.

We will give practical examples of both types of poker intuition in this article, discuss how you might better develop your intuition, and finally look at areas in which intuition can lead us astray. But first, let us investigate whether poker intuition is something worth developing at all.

Does Intuition Belong In Modern Poker?

Red Chip Poker produces regular content on various aspects of the mental game in poker, including material related to poker intuition. We sometimes get feedback on such material, stating that such topics have no place in a math-based game.

Rather than relitigate the “feel player versus math player” debate (partly because it is a false dichotomy anyway), there is a fresher way of approaching this topic. Let us imagine a “poker robot” that plays poker with exquisite mathematical precision. Pretty tough opponent, right? But would such a hypothetical player be lacking something other than a pulse?

Here is coach w34z3l to discuss the topic.

One of the most provocative statements made in the above video deserves to be highlighted:

Your subconscious is a better poker player than you are.

Were you convinced by the arguments for this assertion? Let us review how coach w34z3l reached this conclusion.

The foundation of the poker robot is essentially a perfect GTO player. The robot has instant recall of preflop range charts, and can access a massive library of postflop solves. I suspect we can all agree that such a player would be a formidable adversary.

However, even if we literally used a computer to play poker in this way, it is important to realize that the silicon crusher has limitations.

First, the equilibrium solutions that constitute GTO play are based on the necessary assumption that all players at the table are also poker robots. Opening ranges from our opponents that differ from GTO, as well as subsequent postflop non-GTO plays, can short-circuit the poker robot fairly rapidly, causing it to produce spurious results.

Even allowing the robot to calculate GTO deviations based on population pool tendencies and those of specific opponents, the library that the poker robot accesses will be incomplete. Solutions do not exist for every plausible bet size at every node of the game tree, for example.

Maybe with sufficiently cunning coding we can come close to dealing with necessary interpolations, as well as quantifying the deviations the opponents are making from GTO and perfectly deducing the correct counter-strategies.

But is a human being every really going to play like that. No, of course not. Even for someone with an eidetic memory who puts tens of thousands of hours into studying GTO game trees, the necessary interpolations they use will be approximations based largely on experience.

In other words, even when one has developed a solid theoretical strategy, for many close decisions you are basically giving it your best guess. At some point, the mathematical foundations will always give way to experience-based intuition.

And more importantly, a human has something that the poker robot does not: their subconscious access to the massive data stream stemming from everything that is happening at the table. Our poor poker robot is never going to have a gut feeling about anything.

The subconscious in this discussion is incorporating both forms of intuition that we previously introduced. The first simply reflects the fact that a human attempting to play robotically cannot possess the required recall, nor the real-time calculation speed necessary to incorporate interpolations and deviations. Thus experience-based intuition for some decisions has to be used.

The second form of intuition is one that the poker robot can never achieve: those subconscious signals that cause us to pause, and reevaluate the math-based decision. Sometimes that intuitive trigger will bubble to the surface of our conscious mind and we will be able to articulate precisely what “tell” has provided the critical clue. And sometimes it will not, and you just have to go with your gut.

Profiting From Poker Intuition: Some Examples

When you reach the final table of a poker tournament, the stakes are often high and a wrong decision can end up costing you a sizeable chunk of equity. Many tournament players report that, in such high-pressure situations, they get “zoned in,” so that their poker intuition is at its most effective.

While traditional poker tells are beyond the scope if this article, research into the area has suggested that many players “leak” information more readily when the pressure is high. It follows that those of us trying to take advantage of such information, either consciously or subconsciously, have an elevated opportunity to do so.

Most of the occasions I can recall of my gut feeling leading to a profitable, but non-standard decision come from late-stage tournament play. There is almost certainly a selection bias here — such situations are memorable because there is more money at stake — but I also think it likely that my immersion in gameflow and level of concentration both peak in these spots.

Here is a specific example from a few years ago at the Wynn.

Seven-handed at a final table, I was one of the two short stacks with around 17bb, with the chip leader around 40bb. Action folded to the cut-off sitting on around 25bb who opened. It folded to me and I looked down at a hand I knew to be a standard shove in this situation.

I like to wait twenty seconds before shoving, even when I know what I’m going to do. (This allows me enough thinking time in more ambiguous situations.) Since I had nothing else to do, and largely out of habit, I looked at my opponent from under the brim of my hat. And an alarm bell rang. I don’t know what triggered this alarm, but something about my opponent told me they were very strong.

My usual twenty seconds extended to over a minute as I asked myself if I could really make a fold at complete odds with ranges I had devoted a lot of time to constructing.

I finally kicked in my hand. The cut-off sighed, and with a despondent flick of the wrist deposited his red aces face up in the center of the table.

You may point out, with considerable justification, that the fact I was right in this single occurrence tells us absolutely nothing about poker intuition, nor whether this unorthodox fold was warranted. Maybe I was just scared to bust and being overcome by bad, nitty emotions. We will return to how our poker intuition can do us dirty in the final section of this article.

My primary reason for placing some confidence in this type of poker intuition, is the many similar incidents I have experienced to the one just described.

Situations of intuition-through-experience are perhaps more mundane, but also common on MTT final tables.

In principle, once stacks in a tournament are around 25bb and down, a studied player should be able to make close to perfect decisions. In the push-fold regime, for example, decisions are binary, with range charts available for generic situations. Do I open-shove this hand? If I am shoved on, do I call? Similar questions apply when stacks are slightly deeper and the 3-bet shove becomes the key preflop move.

The primary reason intuition comes into play here is that we rarely are in exactly the situation described by range charts, or even situations that we have studied off table. There are two reasons for this.

First, the distribution of stacks will rarely be even. This impacts all-in ranges preflop. Second, the precise effects of ICM for a given situation are impossible to know without “throwing the problem on the machine.” Added to this is the fact that strong MTT players will deviate from GTO ranges in response to specific opponents and gameflow.

What this means in practice is that, while some preflop decisions are trivial, many crucial preflop decisions on MTT final tables will involve interpolating from reference points that have been established by the player in off-table study. The ability to do this consistently well separates great tournament players from merely good ones.

Nurturing Your Poker Intuition

Given the evidence that poker intuition is valuable, the obvious question is how does one develop this ability to increase the benefits from it?

In the case of experience-based intuition, the answer is simple in principle and more challenging in practice. It is a combination of directed off-table work, as exemplified in resources such as SplitSuit’s workbooks, coupled with in-game experience obtained through playing poker.

Improving the frequency and reliability of gut feeling is more difficult, and almost certainly varies considerably between individuals. Without getting into the academic theory underlying the subconscious and intuition, here are a few ideas that may help.

The first is improving your chances of getting “in the zone” in the sense many sports people use the term. If you’ve played a significant volume of poker, you may have found this happens with no discernible cause. Your understanding of gameflow and the dynamics between players becomes enhanced. You have a sense that a usually tight opponent is playing looser than usual. Maybe something in their body language has communicated that they are frustrated, or laying for another player at the table.

One can add other elements to this list, and at first sight it may appear that all we are talking about is careful observation. That is certainly part of the process, but there is something extra. I would suggest that being in a calm and relaxed state — possibly one akin to light meditation — makes it easier for a subconscious voice to be heard. If you are jabbering away like some TV pros, or worrying about something unrelated to the game, you greatly diminish the opportunities for gut feeling to occur.

And talking of meditation, I think it likely that a regular meditation practice (or being in psychoanalysis) helps us access and trust subconscious triggers. Tommy Angelo has long advocated for meditation, and it is no coincidence that his demeanor at the poker table is one of quiet detachment. He is also quite good at poker.

Fundamentally, the goal is for your subconscious to have a better chance at poking at you so that you make better poker decisions. Some sessions this may not happen at all. But in my experience, it is precisely in big money situations when we are in the zone that our subconscious can provide very tangible EV advantages. The more we can get into that kind of mental state, the more we will profit.

Why Your Poker Brain Makes Bad Decisions

In his discussion of the poker robot, coach w34z3l emphasized that a pure “feel” player is inevitably one with many leaks. In this section we will turn our attention to how the poker brain can, under certain situations, lead us astray. To set the stage, here is w34z3l again with another podcast episode: Poker For Humans.

Our Discord server features a lot of hand history discussion. When someone shares a hand, it is frequently because they faced one or more tough decisions. Since posters are primarily attempting to improve their play through feedback from others, this is perfectly sensible.

However, as the previous video emphasizes, there are a couple of pitfalls with such an approach.

First, difficult decisions often arise because the spot is in some sense unusual. While ideally we should be able to negotiate any situation the poker table throws at us, rare scenarios are unlikely to make a huge difference to our bottom line.

Related to this is that difficult decisions are often close ones. In other words, when faced with an all-in call on the river, the fact the hand is posted on Discord often means the EV difference between calling and folding is negligible.

As coach w34z3l notes, rare events can also have a destructive impact on your mental game. The more poker you play, the more bizarre some of the hands you see will become. I recall a session at the Flamingo when a gentleman sat down and was dealt pocket aces his first three hands.

Can you imagine that happening online? Reddit would burst into flames with another “online poker is rigged” thread.

Results-Oriented Thinking In Poker

There is one particularly pernicious trait of the human brain that hampers in-game decisions and adds to the difficulty in developing and sticking to a solid poker strategy.

The hindsight reflex, often referred to as results-oriented thinking, likely developed as an evolutionary survival advantage. Putting your hand in a fire hurts. The next time you are dealing with fire, you give it a wider berth.

The problem in poker is that losing money is something that can cause almost as much pain as a burned hand. Thus if we make a play based on a solid strategy and we lose the pot, we may be dissuaded from making the same play in the future.

Here is coach w34zel to elaborate on the topic and provide some practical examples.

Results-oriented thinking can certainly impact our play within a given session, but it can be more destructive in the manner it degrades our poker study.

Post-session hand review is a study habit we emphasize strongly at Red Chip Poker. The danger if we allow our analysis to be clouded by hindsight reflex is that we can abandon solid poker strategy when we find our plays repeatedly do not pay off.

In the above video, coach w34z3l notes that bluffing and bluff-catching are particularly vulnerable to this effect. The situation is compounded live, where there is a social pressure not to “look stupid” when we call with a weak hand and get shown the nuts.

Overcoming results-oriented thinking and sticking to theoretically-sound play is one of the steps on the path to mastering poker.

Summary: The Value Of Poker Intuition

We hope the above discussion gives you a clearer idea of what poker intuition is, and why it can be so valuable in practical play. Past experience allows dynamic responses to unexpected situations. This phenomenon is closely related to unconscious competence, which is valuable in many areas of life.

The somewhat spookier “gut feeling” form of intuition may seem a bit flakey at first, but it is again based on psychological and neurological principles. Provided your understanding of poker fundamentals is sound, sometimes relying on your gut can give you an edge over robotic opponents.

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