Thunder, you have quite the knack for creating vibrant threads!

Having read a number of your posts now, I am slightly concerned that you are a personification of the truism "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing".

What seems to be happening is you will state, usually correctly, your understanding of a certain poker concept. A more experienced player (and believe me, everyone who comments on your threads has played way more than a few weeks of poker) then comes along and takes the concept further, into areas you don't understand, and rather than make a concerted effort to learn (such as developing a full understanding of EV, or implied odds), you argue against what they're saying, either questioning their correctness or, worse, refusing to try and learn (the nonsense you keep spouting about "feel".

I'm going to take the "feel" thing and expand on it. Feel, instinct, whatever you want to call it, can ONLY be developed through experience, and experience can only come through repeated practice. Let's say you have played 5,000 hands of poker - a reasonable amount for a fortnight. It may sound like a big number, but if we break it down, it becomes clear quite how small a sample size it is:

There are 169 different hands possible pre-flop, and they are not evenly spread - unsuited cards of different rank are by far the most common, followed by pocket pairs, followed by two cards of the same suit. Taking AA as a sample hand, you should receive AA once every 221 hands. This means that in your entire poker career, you'll have received AA something like 23 times.

Hopefully you'll have heard people referring to sample sizes, and at what point a sample size becomes statistically significant. I can assure you, 23 hands is several orders of magnitude below what would be needed to make informed decisions based on these stats.

So, your 5,000 hands is nowhere near enough to give you any useful information about how the game is played, because the situations which need to be repeated and repeated before you can develop a "feel" simply haven't happened enough times.

There will, of course, be other indicators which require much smaller sample sizes. Let's say you have a maniac to your left who bets 70% and raises 40% of the 100 hands you have played against him. Clearly he is a maniac - which gives you a read (nothing to do with "feel") according t0 which you can adjust your play. Similarly, if a 12/7 rock bets against you on the river, you have a read that tells you not to bluff re-raise him. But these are specific reads developed through specific actions - they are NOT an instinctive knowledge of various plays both hero and unknown villain can make on a two-tone raggy flop when you're holding AKo and the villain re-raised pre-flop.

So - you may honestly believe you have a good "feel" for how to play in certain circumstances, but I PROMISE you you don't. At this stage of your career, you HAVE to concentrate on theory, on maths, on understanding the fundamentals of the game (and EV and implied odds are absolutely fundamentals, don't kid yourself they're optional), because only with this basis can you play poker the right way and observe how your opponents vary, allowing you to play optimally against them.