Random Psychological/Philisophical Bits

I have a pretty different view of a lot of topics to do with conflicts and competition than a lot of people, and I've decided to start this thread for each time I decide to ramble on about some of it so that it might get put to some practical use at some point by someone out there.

The thing I really want to ramble on about right now is the topic of intuition. My first real workings with decisions based on intuition occurred during my tournament chess days when in complex middle game positions, I'd have two possible continuations where one looked just as good as the other when analyzed and evaluated, but one move just "felt better" than the other in some weird way. After a while, I learned to go with my "gut choice" from two similar lines after higher level thinking tools like calculation, analysis and evaluation showed the two continuations to be approximately equal in terms of objectivity. The real point is that I believe this "gut feeling" is one of the few ways our subconscious can communicate with our conscious mind.

So where does all of this come from?

When you spend hours and days and weeks and months of studying or training for something, your conscious mind is good at picking out patterns and creating structures to organize the repetitive bits of information in what you learn. Two good examples of this are learning what hands to play in NLHE in and out of position, and learning how to calculate and apply pot odds and implied odds. Most of our technical play and skill in poker comes from what I think of as the conscious mind.

Now think about what happens after you study certain types of hands for a long period of time. Consider an example of when you're learning what flops are good to c-bet in different spots. There's a lot of different factors that go into this, but after a while you just have a feeling for whether or not it's a good spot to c-bet without having to consciously calculate all of the factors. Sometimes even, you won't immediately know all of the reasons why you think it's a good spot to c-bet, you'll just feel that it's correct to do so. I think that this is the best simple example in NLHE of when intuitive thinking and the subconscious mind begin to manifest themselves.

Putting people on ranges, a topic that seems to give a lot of people a lot of trouble, is really a combination of both types of thinking. You can try to start with a group of hands that your villain would play preflop and slowly eliminate candidate hands as you gain more information (a very conscious thought process), but at the same time you'll usually have a good idea of what types of hands some opponents will have without having to actually go through the analysis (intuitive thought).

Technical skill we can cultivate by reading and asking specific questions about certain topics like bet sizing, how to play specific types of hands, and so on. Intuition, however, is much more laborious to build because it requires tons of time put in where you're really digging in and thinking hard about different situations and scenarios.

The ultimate irony is that we really improve our intuition by studying what are sometimes very specific scenarios against specific opponents, and out of this we eventually gain what's really a more general and overall understanding of poker. It's sort of like we're taking the specific and looking at the inner workings of different spots so we can figure out how all of these inner parts relate to the whole of poker.

I'm sleepy and I'm starting to not make sense. I'll get back to this topic tomorrow -- I've got more to add to this subject that's actually interesting and might be of use to people.

So why are we encouraged to look over our HHs and think more in-depth about the hands that went on during our sessions? I posed this question to two of FTR's more well-known members to see what they had to say. Euphoricism's response was pretty direct: "To get better." TrainerJyms had a longer answer: "Because things appear different when we slow down and reassess our play in particular hands. We may see something we missed before, particularly on hands that don't happen as often [that aren't standard]."

Euphoricism's response was certainly correct, very general. TrainerJyms' response brings up an important topic about the differences between the pace when we practice and when we play for real. This is something I'd like to come back to more in depth later, but for now there's a very specific idea I want to discuss before I have to leave to take my car to the shop.

Have you ever noticed that after a long study session (in poker or whatever your discipline might be) that was going really well that you have this weird moment of feeling really good for no particular reason afterwards? I've heard people, particularly chess players, poker players, and aspiring mathematicians, say the same thing, especially after thinking deeply on a few specific problems or situations. I imagine that a number of people reading this have experienced a similar sensation at least a few times in their lives.

I think that long, deep thinking is one of the main tools at our disposal for intuitive growth. It is very true like TrainerJyms said, that when we review our sessions, we can definitely slow down and take in more information, and often find things that we couldn't find before. When we start getting in the habit of finding these little things that are hard to immediately see over and over again, they start becoming easier to see. After even more work, it stops becoming a conscious act of looking for these little things -- they're just there out in the open for us. We'll start to see them as soon as we see the situation, and we'll start to feel one way or another about them immediately, without having to resort to calculation.

A good example of this is deciding when a villain has a set against our top pair hands. I think it was ProZach who posted a thread maybe two months ago where he posted 5 hands and asked us if we could "spot the set". I remember reading the hands and just immediately having a really strong feeling about which hands of the five were a set and which were not. As I continued to scroll down, I saw that Deanglow and some other fairly strong regular (I forget who, sorry) had made very short posts (like four words at most) indicating the same hands that I had.

But then, below that there were a few relatively new players who went into paragraph-long responses about why they thought each hand was a set or not. They had to try to pick apart the different aspects of each situation and dissect them down to a point that it gave them sufficient information to answer the question. On the other hand, a few of us who had been around a little longer "just knew".

I think about this quite a bit when I play online. Some of the decisions are so complex (at least to me... only been playing a couple years) that you can't ponder all the variables before you time out. So to some extent many crucial decisions rely on intuition, which I agree is gained by playing and learning from many hands. (As an educator, I sadly note every day that not everyone who experiences events in life learns from them.)

In contrast, you watch Poker After Dark primarily for the banter, but the really fascinating times come during the long, long silences. This is when a top, especially thoughtful pro really goes into the tank (guys like Mike Sexton and Phil Ivey come to mind) when a very tough big-stakes decision is needed. (You find out how good the microphones are: they pick up the sound of the air conditioning.) This is when it's so fun to try to think along with the pros, and you almost wish you had not seen the hole cards.

I'm still trying to determine whether what you refer to as intuition involves this kind of deep thought, and if so, to what extent. Or is it so much absorbed that skilled players make the correct decisions without the same thought process.

I do know that the best jazz musicians, those who can play really fast and improvise, get to the point where they no longer think in terms of the notes they are playing, but rather in terms of modes, where scales or parts of scales are used and interconnected with blazing speed in such a way to create something that is aesthetically fascinating. A lesser musician trying that would create just noise. The way the top ones get there is by practice, practice, practice, and by internalizing. They understand the theory, work with it and try different things, keep the good and discard the bad....

I'm not sure how any of this adds to the discussion, if at all, but I think it's related.

I might need to clarify on one particular point.

I think that when you study for periods of time, your intuitive growth is directly proportional to how deep you're thinking and actually into it as opposed to "going through the motions". What I'm referring to as intuition is our subconscious' influence on our conscious decisions, and I don't think it can be built to a really useful level without a lot of work put into studying and whatnot.

I definitely understand what you mean by those musicians thinking in structures instead of individual notes. In chess, beginning players often consider how one single piece is performing some task on the board, and eventually they get to the point that they think in terms of clusters of pieces who share some sort of relationship on the board. I'm not sure if that made sense but I'll leave it there anyway.

You mentioned that you're an educator and I'd be interesting in knowing more specifically what you do. I'm wanting to teach math in a college setting at some point (after I get through the dizzy heights of grad school) but I've tutored and taught labs for everything up through the Calculus sequence and I definitely understand where you're coming from there.

Something I've been toying around with in poker lately is an idea that originally stuck with me when preparing for specific opponents when I wrestled in high school, and is something I really began to take advantage of on a larger scale in chess.

Here's the moment that originally gave me the general idea, and later I'll expand it to chess and poker. In most grappling sports (wrestling, judo, sambo, jiu-jitsu, tai chi chuan moving step, etc.) there's a fight for underhooks while standing because the person who has the inside position standing generally has more leverage and it's easier to control your opponent and do a number of things from there. My problem was that a number of my opponents were much more skilled than I was in taking this inside position because honestly they were stronger, faster, and/or bigger (since I refused to cut more than 5-10 pounds of weight). Instead of combating this head-on, I decided to develop more of my clinch game around having the overhooks instead. Also, against everyone I wrestled with in practice or in off season matches, I would give away the inside position so I could work on my game.

So I practiced and practiced and practiced, and after a couple of months in the off season I felt equally comfortable with or without inside control in the clinch. Inside of that time, I realized that what I had done was an instance of a general theme of avoiding strengths and working on weaknesses, but also (and more importantly) that I was taking part of the conflict away from them. Yes, they had an advantage in taking inside control, but once I gave it to them, the advantage was useless since I was able to nullify it once it reached that position.

A similar theme happens in chess when we prepare our opening repertoires. Often we face opponents that are very proficient in a certain set of openings and work very hard on them. Our job when facing this isn't to study all of their openings until we're better at them than they are. Instead, we look for subtle ways to take the game away from their comfort zone after they have forced it where they perceived they wanted to be. Oftentimes this is a short subvariation that we are able to prepare for that our opponent might not be so familiar with.

The theme here is the same: our opponents want to force the conflict to change so that it has a specific nature or some specific characteristic, and they work very hard to get good at forcing this change. However, if you just allow the change to happen without resistance, then psychologically they're forced to deal with the reality of the new situation, something that puts them at a disadvantage since you are already there. In that moment of weakness is when your preparation shifts the advantage over to you.

So lately I've been considering ways that this could apply to poker, and I'm noticing some things that could have some potential, but I haven't made it too far with it yet. The nature of an individual poker hand doesn't allow for as much free range of choices as chess or wrestling, so I'm having to bend the idea around a bit to see if it can work. There is one spot, however, that I'm somewhat confident about, and that's the example of this theme that I'm going to use for NLHE.

Something that a lot of new players first start to discover is what starting hands to play in early/middle/late position. There are at least a dozen starting hand charts floating around on this site alone. As a result, players new to NLHE have a decent preflop game in comparison to other microstakes players. However, a lot of these players get frustrated because of players calling their raises with hands like A5s, flopping two pair against their top pair top kicker, and taking a good portion of their stack. They don't know how to play against players who are making such apparently terrible decisions preflop because they can't decide if their opponent has bottom pair or middle set.

Without knowingly doing so, these opponents have bypassed our new hero's preflop preparation and are taking the game into a place that these new players aren't as prepared for. The same thing happens when our hero learns how to c-bet, but his opponents start floating him left and right. Hero has been taken out of what he knows how to deal with and is forced to play a game he doesn't know so well.

Perhaps this doesn't have so much application in poker, but for new players it can definitely be a lesson of why you should learn to play well on all streets instead of just preflop and on the flop.

Originally Posted by spoonitnow

Something that a lot of new players first start to discover is what starting hands to play in early/middle/late position. There are at least a dozen starting hand charts floating around on this site alone. As a result, players new to NLHE have a decent preflop game in comparison to other microstakes players. However, a lot of these players get frustrated because of players calling their raises with hands like A5s, flopping two pair against their top pair top kicker, and taking a good portion of their stack. They don't know how to play against players who are making such apparently terrible decisions preflop because they can't decide if their opponent has bottom pair or middle set.

Without knowingly doing so, these opponents have bypassed our new hero's preflop preparation and are taking the game into a place that these new players aren't as prepared for. The same thing happens when our hero learns how to c-bet, but his opponents start floating him left and right. Hero has been taken out of what he knows how to deal with and is forced to play a game he doesn't know so well.

Perhaps this doesn't have so much application in poker, but for new players it can definitely be a lesson of why you should learn to play well on all streets instead of just preflop and on the flop.

This is exactly where I am right now. Having moved up to 10NL through winning a tournament I'm finding that my standard "play" just doesn't seem to be getting me anywhere and for the moment I'm a losing player at this level (a small sample, 1K+, but when you're only doing 1 table it takes a while to grow). So yeah, I'm constantly having hands where I really have no clue where I'm at. Do I want to bet, if so do I want to be called. WTF does this c/c flop, c/r reraise mean?!?!

I'm actually really hating the fact that UB doesn't have a 5NL level because at times I feel as if I'm completely out of my depth at where I'm at.

Having done mathematics graduate school, I'll add this. Mathematicians tend to ask: "I wonder if this thing is true?" This conjecturing is the first step in proving something, which is how research mathematicians make a living. After a while, when you look at a conjecture, you just have a feeling about whether or not it's true. It's almost always correct to go with that gut feeling. After a while, experience and knowledge combine into intuition, and you don't waste time analyzing every factor in a complex setting.

For a mathematician, saying "I feel like this is true" can be a very technical analysis combining dozens of facts and experiences into intuition that generally points in the right direction.

But don't use the word "feel" in an FTR post. I made that mistake once, and lived to regret it.

Originally Posted by Robb

Having done mathematics graduate school, I'll add this. Mathematicians tend to ask: "I wonder if this thing is true?" This conjecturing is the first step in proving something, which is how research mathematicians make a living. After a while, when you look at a conjecture, you just have a feeling about whether or not it's true. It's almost always correct to go with that gut feeling. After a while, experience and knowledge combine into intuition, and you don't waste time analyzing every factor in a complex setting.

For a mathematician, saying "I feel like this is true" can be a very technical analysis combining dozens of facts and experiences into intuition that generally points in the right direction.

But don't use the word "feel" in an FTR post. I made that mistake once, and lived to regret it.

I'll be in grad school for mathematics before too much longer, and I definitely feel you on that one.

The professor I have for most of my algebra theory classes (groups, rings, etc.) had something really cool to say about this in my first class on groups about a year and a half ago:

At the beginning of each class, she would write a statement on the board that we may or may not know whether it's true or false. Inside of about a minute or two we were supposed to decide if it was true or false, write our answer on a piece of paper and hand it in. If we weren't sure, she told us to flip a coin, if it was heads, consider it to be true, and if it was tails, consider it to be false. Then, if we had a feeling of disappointment about the result of the coin-flip, then that was our intuition telling us that the answer was likely wrong.

I'm no mathematician, or philosopher, or anything like that. However, I do have something to add on the subject of intuition that may be useful to someone.

I have been studying Jiu Jitsu for 15 years. I have 4 years kickboxing, and have been fighting MMA for about 3 years now. A lot of the training that I do involves repition. Repition of movement, attacks, counters, finishers, hip placement, exercise, thought processes, combinations, and many other things that some people don't realize are involved in sport fighting.

The repitition was explained to me like this. -The mind and the body work in unison with each other. One does not act without the other, and one does not act different than the other. Even in sleep, while our mind works, our body reacts without our knowledge. To this extent the body becomes automated.

The mind works at incredible speeds. So fast that you can finish an entire thought process before you realize it. This is Subconcious vs Concious thought. All stimulation to the brain is remembered in the subconcious mind. Every word you have heard in your life has been stored. You are unaware of this but its true. That's why it's imperitive to do repetitive training in any physical or mental activity. When the thought process is stored in your subconcious it is accessible at any time. The more times that the thought is repeated, the easier it will be to access. This is why we repeat our training. This is why we play thousands of hands. The more times that we see this situation, the easier and faster we will be able to recall the correct thought process that brings us out on top.

So intuition can be described as the recalling of repetitive thoughts within the subconcious mind for a specific situation. This even happens fast enough to tell you that when that guy grabs your arm and turns his hips to the left, you had better follow him or your arm will come off. So I have no doubt that it is applicable to poker.

I can definitely appreciate the role of intuition in the physical as well playing various sports for a number of years while I was in school.

I think one of the biggest things we get from doing single motions hundreds and thousands of times over and over is a sort of continuous refinement of our skills. It's not that we're necessarily doing the same motion over and over only to ingrain it in our brains (although it's definitely that too so that we're able to react "without thinking"), but through these repetitions we start to see deeper into the motions and understand what's happening on a more subtle level.

Imagine the very first time you ever saw someone perform an armbar on someone in their guard (anyone who doesn't know what that is, just imagine the first time you saw someone hit a baseball or some other movement in a sport that you now understand fairly well). It probably seemed like a lot was going on and maybe you couldn't immediately wrap your head around what you had just witnessed. Now compare that observation to how you see it now. You understand all sorts of nuances of the body mechanics and know exactly what's going on without having to think about it.

If you compare how you observe those things now to how a beginner would see them, it's sort of like you're seeing more frames than the beginner would because you know what you're looking at. Those "in between" frames have come as a result of studying your art, whatever it may be. The learning process allows us to see reality in a much more detailed way, and I think this is what drives a lot of people who just love to learn about new things, no matter what the subject.

I think one of the biggest things we get from doing single motions hundreds and thousands of times over and over is a sort of continuous refinement of our skills. ( From Spoons Post )

Oh, so its kinda like masterbation. I get it

Sorry Spoon, J/K.

Someday I would love to get you on gameknot.com spoon and give you a chess match. I'm only about a 1500 player but would be fun to get my ass kicked by you. Man, some of the top players on that site have insane records and ratings. Some dude is like 611-6 with a 2476 rating, and he's only the 3rd best player. Guess I wouldn't catch him in a fools mate.

Interesting post Spoon as always!!

Originally Posted by Deuce Blue

I think one of the biggest things we get from doing single motions hundreds and thousands of times over and over is a sort of continuous refinement of our skills. ( From Spoons Post )

Oh, so its kinda like masterbation. I get it

Sorry Spoon, J/K.

Someday I would love to get you on gameknot.com spoon and give you a chess match. I'm only about a 1500 player but would be fun to get my ass kicked by you. Man, some of the top players on that site have insane records and ratings. Some dude is like 611-6 with a 2476 rating, and he's only the 3rd best player. Guess I wouldn't catch him in a fools mate.

Interesting post Spoon as always!!

Salsa4ever's peak was quite a bit higher than my peak, but then again my peak came when I was like 18 or so and then sex with random girls and later poker started taking over. He's probably quite a bit better player than myself.

My USCF peaked at like 1700, but on different sites (FICS/ICC) I ran between 1800-1900. If you'd like we can get a few of the guys around on a common site and play a bit for fun or something one day.

the same works in climbing - engrams... why did you twist your body like that? i didn't realise i had, it's obvious...

Originally Posted by spoonitnow

So lately I've been considering ways that this could apply to poker, and I'm noticing some things that could have some potential, but I haven't made it too far with it yet.

One way it applies to poker is through adjusting to your opponents. What we are trying to do when we adjust our game to our opponents (either specific opponents or the entire table) is to use their apparent strengths against them and force them into unfamiliar spots where they are more likely to make mistakes.

If there are 2 or 3 players to your left who are very tight, you open more hands in LP when they are in the blinds. You use their apparent strength of preflop starting hand selection against them. You are forcing them to either catch a hand or play back at your obvious steals. Hands don't come around often enough, and they usually aren't that good at playing weak hands, especially out of position.

against lagtards I play loose-passive, almost like a calling station (you can also take on the guise of a TAG, and just outkick them, which is probably the easier solution). sometimes you push them out just because, usually because your hand while strong is still vulnerable, but a lot of the time you let them hang themselves. you know your opp likes to limp low PP's, and only continues with sets. then you can either raise pf and take the pot down 1/7 times, or limp along with suited connectors and stack him with straights/flushes.

if your specific opponent is capable of folding big hands, then let him. If he isn't folding middle pair to an overbet, then take TP any kicker and stack his ass.

I think I just realized that I have been using a version of the ISF theorem to determine my optimal stacking range, but didn't know how to put it (at least I think I am). I did this a lot at 25 and 50 NL especially, where opponents had a much wider range for putting their entire stack in.

If he is going with any pair, take middle pair and go with it. If he is going with TP any kicker, take TP med kicker. As his range tightens, you get the opportunity to play for bluffs, as opposed to stacks.

well, now I am just rambling, sorry.

Confidence is a bitch sometimes. I had a pretty good January as a whole, even though I ran like total ass for the first 30k hands or so, but for February it's been like 100% running like shit over the relatively small amount I've played. As a result, I've been getting down on myself a bit and all this shit.

After I withdrew a chunk of my bankroll to pay for last year's taxes and this year's first quarter taxes, I dropped back down to 100nl for a bit and since when I left I was running like 4-4.5 ptbb/100 I figured it would be a nice change of pace. I could take my time to pick up a few Gs and then start back at 200nl around the beginning of March. Instead, I broke even for like my first 15k and was running bad in all-in EV by like 6-7 buy-ins even though I was only down about 2.5-3 buy-ins overall. Blah blah blah, confidence shot, blah blah blah.

So then I saw that I ranked #14th in winnings in January for 1/2 and I was like lol holy shit wtf that was my first month of 1/2 and I only played like 2 weeks. Confidence is back up over something I sort of already knew. It's weird. This post sucks but I'm feeling sort of drunk off of sinus medicine so I'll bbl.

If you get on gameknot.com spoon and challenge me to a game I'd be willing. If I remember right I'm kirkb on that site. Man, I haven't played since poker became more interesting.

Anyway, you can make it like 3 days between moves so as not to interfere with poker.

I'll check every couple days and see if your game.

Originally Posted by Deuce Blue

If you get on gameknot.com spoon and challenge me to a game I'd be willing. If I remember right I'm kirkb on that site. Man, I haven't played since poker became more interesting.

Anyway, you can make it like 3 days between moves so as not to interfere with poker.

I'll check every couple days and see if your game.

I registered and challenged you. If that was the wrong screen name then my name there is spoonitnow.

We are good to go spoon. My God its been awhile. Queens pawn opening, keep it simple. LOL

I would like to share something that happened to me when I was a senior in high school and relate it to something funny.

I had been dating this girl for a year. I had known her for a while before, but she was my first serious girlfriend, and I was as in love with her as a seventeen year old could be. I treated her like a proverbial princess. So, for our little one year anniversary or whatever, she gave me a card with a letter inside detailing how she was a total slut. I puked burritos in her bedroom floor midway through the letter (the only time I've ever puked from something like nerves or whatever). It wasn't pretty, and outside of being sick or injured, it's probably the worst feeling I've ever had in my life.

Well that particular ex-girlfriend is a bitch, and so is poker. Earlier this week I lost KK < QQ on K82 rainbow for a little over a full stack. That's an example of the worst beat possible in hold'em, and I had 99.899% equity with no chance for a tie. I laughed and within 10-15 minutes I had forgotten about it. I didn't remember it until I was looking over my biggest losing hands of the session later in the day (which I do every day).

I've noticed that I tend to play much better when I have a limited amount of distractions as compared to no distractions at all. I've got to have AIM or IRC or something up or I feel like I get bogged down and can't think. Maybe it has to do with morale, or keeping my brain from getting burnt out on poker as quickly, I'm not sure.