I don't think it's as black and white?

In the end, to truly be good, you have to be both.

You need to know (approximately) the probability of events happening, if a move is generally + or - EV etc.... but a lot of your decisions, especially in a live game, has to come down to feel right?

There is no precise answer for, "how much do I raise to not scare him away", "does he have me beat or does he just have two over cards?".

Poker is like trading, it's both an art and a science...... you don't become a good trader just b/c you have a Ph D. in Economics, but you can't just trade willy nilly on gut feel either....

Cheers,

S

For example, I definitely know approximately what to do with what hands, when to

A wise old reg once told me:

"I don't care about the math, I only care about the odds"

after he stacked off with underpair to the board and rivered a set against me. To this day I still haven't fully grasped the genius behind this concept.

Feel is just an excuse for making plays where you dont know why you did it. Thank god for having people who actually value "feel" as a skill. We should all tell feel people that they are doing the right thing.

Statistics are important, and thinking through more or less of the hand - where it's not about math, statistics or feel but about all of them, though many times the feel or experience tells one to ignore the math (that's for ******s) but they all play together.

if you put the feel player against the math player, the feel player will win short term. over thousands of hands however the math wins out

Why?

If you put a bad player against a good player the bad player may win short term. Over thousands of hands however the good player will ALWAYS win.

We're not talking about good and bad here though. Thread is about feel vs math, and while the 'math guy' might theoretically better, there are obviously many 'feel guys' that are insanely good so it isn't necessarily obvious that one type is good and the other bad.

I asked 'WHY?' because he said the feel player WILL win short term, and the MATH player will win long term.

Why will the feel player win short term? Can't the math player come out on top in a single session?

And why does the math player have to win long term? Again, I don't think one style or approach to the game is necessarily better than the other.

Personally I think that I am something in between the two. I play a lot of tables and use a lot of stats on my HUD. This would be the math part in me. When I'm ranging villains or estimating my equity in a given spot I'm never really using complicated math because there isn't anytime for it. Rather, I make plays because they are 'standard' or they are just spots where I get into often enough that my 'feel' serves me well enough to make the correct decision most of the time anyway so wasting all those precious seconds on math would have dminishing returns while 24 tabling.

If someone Is basing thier play strictly on feel then they are bad. Period. What they have special superhuman powers to read your soul? I dont agree that the feel player will win short term always. The bottom line is you need both. If you are calling to draw to a flush on the turn getting 3-1 its -ev no matter how good your "feel" game is. You cant ignore the math and go by feel and have long term success. Thats a fact. You could ignore feel and still remain profitable by using only a mathematical approach

I think the line between feel and math blends more than we realize, as someone pointed out earlier. Our intuition (feel) is our subconscious brain at work. So much of this "feel" is actually our experience working with numbers and ranges.

I think it's much more efficient to learn the game in a mathematical way, and more likely to lead to consistent results. But many feel players are essentially doing the same thing as the math guys, just not consciously.

pg_780, you should look up a term called 'thin-slicing', if you aren't already familiar with it. Its quite fascinating. There is a great book called 'blink' by Malcolm Gladwell on the subject. There are many situations where our subconscious mind or intuition is just going to be incredibly more efficient than our conscious mind.

The human brain is truly amazing. Not so much for what we consciously use it for, but rather for what goes on behind the scenes.

And for the record, a player who takes a mathematical approach to the game with tons of experience will have that intuition, and their intuition will be vastly superior to the guy who just goes on 'feel' alone.

I've read the book, actually. Very cool. I liked the tennis coach who was 40/40 or something in predicting fault serves from his player in a match while he was in his back swing.

The word "feel" might be bad, and for reasons other than "so to speak" (sexual references)

However, I prefer the words "conscious energy decision making" versus "mathematical probabilities and/or positive equity based decision making"

With the Math side, the majority of our amazing posters on here, and I truly mean that, give you the equity in certain situations, how to bet size, all these things. They are important, they build a basement for the house of our game that we are creating everyday. I myself am still learning this side.

With the CEDM side, the conscious energy side, I feel I really excel at it, but I have played a lot more live as far hours go. Online, you still could gain the energy of another person, through bet sizing, timing, the way they play certain situations deep in a tournament or how their mechanics are in a check-raise situation versus the pot size in a cash game, but live you will gain a lot more.

Remember walking somewhere, anywhere in your life, and feeling someone approaching, a stranger, a friend? Do you remember how it felt right before they said "Hello" or reached out to touch you? Well, that energy you are feeling before someone is touching you is an energy force all in itself without much explanation. Live players and some online ones too have developed a feeling for this energy. It is not some "feel" that they are super donkish and going to catch a card, but a feel for how their opponent is playing and it truly helps them make some amazing and correct decisions using all the knowledge acquired throughout their play with the opponent.

This energy knows no bounds between negative and positive energy, but to tap into, it takes a person willing to not be self-conscious and understanding that their place at the table is not their hole cards, chip stack, or any of that, but rather earning a relationship with the other players, catering to their style of play and figuring out motives and how their motives and image is being portrayed. The game is constantly evolving, so as Bruce Lee says "Be like water, my friend."

Brett

Sounds like more of a "luck vs. skill players" conversation going on. I think the "feel" player should be defined a bit more.

Like stated before, I think the subconscious is more mathematical than what's assumed. I mean, it doesn't take a math wiz to realize that your in a tough spot on the turn with only a flush draw.

I'm getting away from the point though. What if we said "experienced feel player?"

If one has a betting tell and the math doesn't quite up you can use logic too make a call I don't know if this is what you mean by 'feel'.

You're still using math, you've just adjusted your opponents' range..

Grunching...

Learn and practice the math to a point where the knowledge is inherent and instinctual, then forget about it and go back to being a "feel" player.

If you rely on feelings you are at a disadvantage vs non emotional affected players with the same skillset. Despise that its actually a good thing to implement the math skillset as a kind of feel. For example if you don't have enough time to calculate pot-odds, just to estimate if you are good or not.
But doing things just because it feels good is certainly a losing strategy.

It's not that you actually have a good feeling exactaly, it's just that you know what to do and don't really have to think about it.

Most of the instincts come from experience. Some also are gifted with better card sense and pick up the game faster. Also the math is there you just don't use it.You don't need to learn it or ever think about it. It's just built in.I've never ever in my career saw a number in my head during a poker hand and never will. But if most of the decisions weren't on the right side mathematically then I'm sure you would find out pretty fast that maybe you need to calculate odds in your head to improve.

Yes. I was hoping you were going to say something like "that feeling you get when everyone at the table knows the guy has it, but something about how the hand went down makes you think he's bluffing, even if you can't put your finger on it."

Because that type of feel is subconscious and intuitive, which doesn't mean it's not based on fact. It could be something you're "sensing" about seeing or hearing the opponent do something that came in under the radar.

What you're talking about is just silliness though

Uh..... no. Now it could be you saw his stack out of the corner of your eye, didn't gauge the exact pot odds, but just had a "feeling" (based on things your subconscious actually had access to - like stack sizes and previous hand histories) that you could make a profit on the hand. That's fine. But frankly, I can't tell what the heck you're talking about half the time in this thread.

After a quick scan of the first page of this it feels like one of the more disappointing threads I've ever seen. Perhaps I should have taken such a thing for granted at the home of "poker's only math," but when you consider there's no math you're gonna whip out on feel-playing Phil Ivey that's going to get you anywhere with him (i.e., prevent your being crushed), you'd think someone would have realized the subject deserves better than what I've found here so far. I'll keep reading, though.