How Intuition Helps in Poker: Tips from Pros

Posted: September 15, 2021

Updated: September 15, 2021

It is generally accepted that poker is a mixture of psychology and mathematics
But what about intuition in this case?
In this article, let’s figure out how intuition helps in poker

Any poker player has situations during the game when one has a gut feeling of how everything will happen. Indeed, it is generally accepted that poker is a mixture of psychology and mathematics. However, what about intuition in this case? Is it really important or does it just get in the way of the decision-making process? To understand these issues in detail, it is first necessary to understand what intuition is in general and at what moments it manifests itself. In this article, let’s figure out how intuition helps in poker.

What is Intuition?

If you do not go deeply into the terminology, then intuition is inner confidence in something without the presence of objective reasons for this. The problem is that such confidence is not based on any logical reasoning. So can you trust it after that? Even though intuitive decision-making is not connected with logic, all its benefits are hidden in the reasons for the appearance. When a poker player studies the game and constantly works on it, examples of a wide variety of situations accumulate in one’s memory. Such knowledge will always be useful because it has been worked out in detail by you many times. It is thanks to this information that intuition arises, which suggests a solution for a specific problem at the table. Besides, poker is an excellent platform for conducting experiments to improve your intuition. Indeed, this game is characterized by incomplete information, where not only logical thinking plays a role, but also analysis based on one's observations. But how intuition helps in poker? Some professional players consider it extremely important in the online poker sites in the USA.

How Intuition Helps in Poker: Main Aspects

Based on the foregoing, it can be said unequivocally that the sixth sense is important in poker. However, learning such a skill will not work. You can only purchase it after spending many hours analyzing sessions and the game itself. Some players think that in offline poker, intuition plays a much more important role because there you can watch your opponents live and study their behavior. Indeed, it would be foolish to argue with that. But even when playing online on the Intertops Poker site, the sixth sense is definitely worth using.

Moreover, your intuition will make it easier to play. But how to understand when it should be trusted and when not? After all, it would not be entirely correct to rely solely on the urges of the sixth sense in every spot. This is the disadvantage of poker intuition since it cannot give a 100% guarantee that the decision made on a subconscious level will be correct. All in all, you only need to rely on your own experience. If you spend a lot of hours working on a game outside the poker tables, you have a greater advantage over opponents who spend less time working out their strategy or not doing it at all. Accordingly, you need to trust your inner sense more in those cases when you are confident in your strategy.

What is Not Worth Doing

For starters, you don't need wishful thinking. Attempts to deceive yourself will not lead to anything good. Indeed, the player either has intuition, or it does not exist at all. There are poker players who, during a session, prefer to make decisions based on their intuition, and any statistics and logic of actions do not play a special role for them. In other cases, gamblers tend to rely more only on their experience and existing knowledge, ignoring the "inner voices". You need to understand that intuition is not a magic skill that will allow you to play 20 tables without sacrificing performance. In situations of a random nature, the sixth sense is not particularly helpful. Your instincts will only work for those moments that you encounter. So how intuition helps in poker? It is an addition to your knowledge and experience.

How Intuition Helps in Poker: Ways to Develop Your Sixth Sense

First, you need to understand an important thing. As we said before, intuition in poker is not a superpower, but your own accumulated knowledge. It turns out that a rich experience in the past is needed for the development of the inner sense. Indeed, the more hands a poker player has played, the easier it is for him to react to certain non-standard situations during the game. Therefore, the development of intuition is possible. After all, this is an unconscious way to retrieve the stored information. Accordingly, such storage can be expanded and filled with new data. Constant work on the game and a professional attitude towards poker will allow you not only to have an advantage over your opponents but also make your sixth sense more valuable for making quick decisions.

No doubt talent and personality are important. However, that doesn't mean you can't be successful without them. Practice and willpower can lead any person to success. Thus, always try to review the hands played during the session. Played a big hand? Take a few seconds to use the replayer. Besides, always pay attention to the size of your opponents' bets, behavior on certain board textures, and other nuances. This is a key source of information that will be deposited in the subconscious and will certainly help on the online poker sites in the USA.

Train the Subconsciousness

During the pause between sessions, it is always helpful to look at a few hands that you did not participate in. Surely a lot of people don't. Try to pay attention to those moments that were missed during the game. For example, if the hand ended with a showdown, pause it and analyze the spot to guess what cards your opponents had. Such analysis allows you to collect a lot of useful information about the mistakes and inclinations of opponents. In the future, you will be able to use the collected data against the same players. Besides, you will react faster in similar situations at the tables against other opponents. Indeed, your brain collects statistics on a subconscious level. Therefore, do not think that in a couple of weeks you will still forget everything, and the information received will be useless. Yes, you won't be able to thoroughly memorize every sizing and specific move in a given situation. However, some of the main points will stay. And at the right time, you can intuitively make the right decision. Read about all the Ways Poker Makes You Smarter in our article.

Intuition vs. Strategy

The main problem with playing according to intuition is that we do not have clear criteria for assessing its effectiveness. Any player usually evaluates the success of an intuitive game by eye and the accuracy of such measurements can suffer greatly. Nevertheless, there is a very real and systematic approach that can help evaluate your intuition and understand how good decisions you make when you trust it and, most importantly, in which particular area of the game. After all, for example, your intuition can give you great pre-flop decisions and flop decisions. The essence of the idea is simple, first of all, you need a clear understanding of your game strategy. What do you do: pre-flop, flop, and other betting streets? All in all, you need to be clear about when and how you should act based on your poker strategy. Every time you deviate from it, based on your intuition, then the results of this distribution you should note and separate from the rest of the game. In other words, you can conduct and analyze 2 types of hands:

Hands where you played your poker strategy;
Games where you decide to deviate from it.

how intuition helps in poker, poker strategy — Picture Source: Free SVC

This can be very easily implemented, both with the help of HM2, simply marking such distributions and filtering them in the future, or by maintaining a separate table in Excel or Google docs. As a result, having typed a certain number of hands, sufficient for analysis, you will be able to see not an approximate, but a completely accurate picture of the effectiveness of your game when you make some kind of intuitive decision. You will also have very unambiguous evaluation criteria. Thus, you can evaluate the success of your intuitive game and understand whether it really benefits you or not.

How Intuition Helps in Poker: Conclusion

At the moment when some skill is perfected by a person to the stage of complete unconscious competence, all the information received is sorted in the brain into more complex categories. Since such a grouping requires impressive experience, the only sure way to improve your intuition is to spend enough time developing a skill that will be fixed in your mind. As a result, even if you are asked a difficult question, given that you cannot give a fully reasoned answer right now, you will intuitively realize how the situation will develop in the future. Our subconscious decisions are the very inner sense that sometimes cannot be explained by its owners. You should not chase attempts everywhere and always invoke attempts at an intuitive approach to solving problems. At the right time, the sixth sense will arise by itself and, taking into account the impressive preliminary study of the material, will tell you how to act correctly. It will not be possible to artificially call a sixth sense, no matter how many gamblers would like it. So how intuition helps in poker? Well, it works differently for every player. Learn the Art of Bluffing and visit the Intertops Poker to practice your skills. Good luck!