While trusting your instincts at the poker table can bring success it is a road with many pitfalls
Take a moment and suspend your disbelief. Imagine you’re on a fabulous game show hosted by that master of psychological illusion, Derren Brown (I promise to get to the poker soon enough).
In the garish studio there are three doors. Behind one of the doors, Derren explains, is a fabulous sports car. Behind the other two are booby prizes, and your task is to pick the door with the sports car.
You opt for door number one. Derren, who knows where the car is, decides to make things interesting, and opens door number two. Behind it is the vilest of booby prizes – a night out in Hull with a Big Brother contestant of your choice.
Now Derren offers you the chance to change your decision. You can stick with door one, or you can switch and choose door three. What should you do?
If you haven’t seen this problem before, your instinct may be to stick with your original choice. After all, you had a one in three chance of being correct when you first chose a door, and you might think that Derren was trying to trick you into choosing incorrectly by switching. Indeed, doesn’t door three also have a one in three chance of being the correct one, in which case there is no benefit to switching?
In fact, this is an excellent example of how intuition is misleading. There is actually a significant benefit to switching doors. Now that you’ve read that, your intuition might tell you that the chance of being right if you switch is one in two, and the chance of being right if you don’t switch is just one in three (since you’re now choosing from two boxes, not three). But that too would be wrong!
The key is that Derren had to open a door with a booby prize behind it.Imagine that the car is behind door three. Derren has to open door two, because he cannot open the door that you’ve chosen, and he can’t open the one with the car behind it.
Because of Derren’s involvement, you must switch. To see why, let’s look at all the situations in which you switch:
If the car is behind door one, Derren can open either door two or three. You switch, and lose.
If the car is behind door two, Derren must open door three. You switch, and win.
If the car is behind door three, Derren must open door two. You switch, and win.
Now let’s look at all the situations in which you stay with your original choice:
If the car is behind door one, Derren opens door two or three and you win.
If the car is behind door two, Derren opens door three and you lose.
If the car is behind door three, Derren opens door two and you lose.
So you see that in actual fact, when you switch you will win two out of three times, but when you stay with your original choice, you’ll win just one out of three times. You’re twice as likely to win when you switch doors.
Poker is absolutely packed with counter-intuitive situations like the Derren Brown problem.
Yet many players proudly proclaim to be ‘intuitive’ or ‘feel’ players, almost as if being a logical, clear-headed player is a weakness. In Super System, Doyle Brunson even wrote: ‘I believe some good poker players actually employ a degree of extrasensory perception (ESP)…you can’t imagine how often I’ve called a player’s exact hand to myself and been proven right…in the rare situations when all your card knowledge and best judgement leave you in doubt, go with your strong feeling and not against it.’
While there’s no rational basis for believing in ESP, Doyle was likely hitting on the importance of intuition at the poker table. Intuition is both a poker player’s best friend and worst enemy. If used correctly, it can be extraordinarily powerful. If interpreted in the wrong way, it can be utterly devastating to your game.
The key downside to intuition is that over-relying on it undermines our understanding and acceptance of probability, which is so important to being a winning poker player. It’s all too easy to ‘just know’ that you’re going to hit a particular card, and make an odds-defying call that you wouldn’t normally make. Alternatively, maybe you put your opponent on a very specific hand, because that’s what your instinct tells you they have, instead of thinking about your opponent’s possible range of hands in the situation. All too often, I hear a player remark that they ‘put him on A-K’, to the exclusion of the other 168 possible starting hands. Usually, this player has just gone broke!
However, it’s clear that intuition and instinct have an upside, or they wouldn’t be so vehemently espoused by so many of poker’s top players. Indeed, a top player uses both logic and intuition to come up with the best decision. Getting the balance right is one of the things that separates the pros from the wannabes.
Some plays in poker don’t make sense when analysed using intuition alone. For example, take the following situation. You’re in a tournament, with six players remaining. The payout structure of the tournament is such that the top five players all get £1,000, but the person who finishes sixth gets nothing (it could be a satellite, or a ‘double or nothing’ style tournament). Two players have a bigger stack than you, and three have smaller stacks. You pick up pocket Aces on the button, but before the action gets to you, one of the short stacks moves all-in and is called by a bigger stack. Should you move all-in yourself?
Many players’ first instinct is to move all-in here, but that’s a huge mistake.
Because of the payout structure of the tournament, your goal is to simply survive until one more player is eliminated. There’s no extra value in moving up the pay scale beyond that, or winning the tournament.
By moving all-in, you put yourself in a situation where you might be eliminated – when you lose the pot and the short stack survives. There is no upside to getting involved but a huge downside. If you do the maths, you’ll find that it’s actually unprofitable to push all-in here, even with the best possible starting hand. You are better off folding, hoping the short stack gets eliminated. If they survive, then you re-evaluate the situation on the next hand.
There are many common fallacies in poker that derive from a ‘gut feeling’ or misunderstood logic. One that I see over and over again is the idea that luck ‘evens out’ in the game. It doesn’t. Luck doesn’t even out because luck doesn’t have a memory. It does not know that the last four times you were all in pre-flop with pocket Aces, you lost.
In fact, it’s incredibly unlikely for luck to exactly even out, and for your results in a particular situation to exactly match the probabilities.
What happens is that, in the long run, winning and losing streaks become increasingly insignificant. What seems like a long series of losses now might make very little difference to your overall results over years of play. That’s just another good reason to be emotionally detached, and think about the game with logic and reason rather than with intuition and instinct.
So if your instinct clouds the issue and sets traps, should you listen to it at all? Yes, but only in the right circumstances and only after you’ve allowed your instinct to develop in the first place.
Great poker players use a combination of instinct and logical techniques to come to the right decisions. Most of the time, they’ll rely on solid fundamentals, such as an understanding of hand values, betting patterns, probability and odds. But on close decisions, they allow their instinct to tip the scales.
When you start out in poker, your instinct won’t be very good and you should probably ignore it most of the time.
Through hours of practice, repetition and paying attention to thousands of hands, you’ll build up a subconscious memory bank of poker situations. Something will happen at the table to trigger that memory, and that will be manifested as instinct. You’ll be able to call an opponent’s hand, but you won’t know how you came up with it.
It’s very important that you don’t allow your instinct to control you, at least not until you’re highly confident in it. Test yourself first, before the really important decision arrives. Observe one of the hands your opponents are involved in, and try to guess what their hands are. Do it whenever you get the chance, and see how often you are correct. The more often you guess right, the more you can rely on your instinct in difficult situations, and the more confident you’ll become.
We’ve touched on some of the downsides to intuition, but let’s look at the upside, and how intuition and instinct can help you think through a hand. You’re midway through a tournament, and you’ve opened in the cut-off with pocket tens. The big blind has put in a big re-raise, committing a third of his stack, and the action is back on you. Should you call, fold, or raise all-in? If you were an intuition player, your thought process might go like this: ‘I raised from late position, so he might be re-stealing with a worse hand. I paused and looked around before I raised; did he pick up on that and read it as weakness? Why did he raise a third of his stack, but not go all-in? Is it because he doesn’t want to risk all his chips with a weak hand, or is he encouraging me to call? He looks nervous, but is that because he’s bluffing or because he’s got the nuts? Where have I seen that facial expression before? How do I feel about moving all-in?’
This is a read-dependent situation. Against some opponents, this is an easy shove. Against others, it’s an easy fold. If you don’t know your opponent well, this might be a good time to see if your instinct serves you well, and do what feels right.
Intuition can be a powerful tool, but remember that intuition doesn’t make the whole decision. Instead, it tips the balance on close decisions. Also, don’t forget that intuition is frequently misleading and that only through practice and paying attention can you improve its accuracy. If you can do that, you’ll become a fearsome poker player, and I hope to never meet you at the tables!
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