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.