Trusting your gut instinct

Poker Strategy / Marcus Bateman / 16 December 2009 / Leave a Comment

Sometimes in poker, situations arise where your instincts really take over from your rational mind. Especially against good, thinking players; or against people you have long histories against, occasionally hands crop up where your head is saying something while your gut says something else.

This feeling is often quite hard to describe, but one that it is important not to ignore, as it can prove one of your most effective weapons at the poker table. Gut instinct is - for the most part - your subconscious experience coming out in certain situations where the 'right' move does not feel correct. Of course you do not want to habitually calling down three bullets from someone with middle pair etc, but sometime you know a player is capable of it, and on occasion you just have to trust your gut when they start firing and make a stand.

Poker is a game of feel for the most part - regardless of which variant you play. Although some people will need this more - a heads up no limit hold'em player has to have a much better grasp of this than a full ring limit player for example - both need to be able to trust their instincts in certain situations to be winning players, be it calling a river all in when playing no limit games, or folding to just one bet on the river in limit when getting very good odds.

People often struggle with this, simply because when they trust their instincts they are occasionally proved wrong. This leads them to start never relying on gut feeling, and just playing a stale and predictable game. As with all things in poker, being wrong on occasion is not bad - in a game of incomplete information you can never be 100% accurate 100% of the time. The important thing is that over the long run you are right more often than you are wrong.

The line between genius and insanity is very close in poker (just as it is in real life for the most part) and a big part of this is gut instinct. The plays which truly separate good players from weak ones are often irrational and dangerous, but they are calculated subconsciously from a wealth of experience the player has about certain situations, and good players know when to trust this feeling; and are able to use it ruthlessly to run rings around their opponents.

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