understanding theory gives you the confidence to play poker the way its meant to be played. variance and losses aren't as upsetting when you know that you made the correct decisions

i thiink the place that every player who studies is trying to get to is: where they always know roughly what to do every time the action is on them. i dont know if its possible to reach a place where you know exactly what decisions to make in every node of the game tree, but maybe the best players come close. im not talking about perfect decisions, but roughly correct decisions

this will definitely depend on the type of poker, big bet games are massive compared to limit games

these are my questions:

1. how much 'certainty' can a player develop if they are dedicated to studying poker for years or even decades? in this question certainty means always knowing what to do in every decision point

2. how much certainty do you guys think the top pros have when playing the game?

3. how much certainty do you have personally when playing?

for example i think that i know roughly what i should do about 70-80% of the time, but the rest of the time i am torn between two options

I don't mean to be rude, but these questions are dumb.

replace certainty with confidence and i'd be interested in what upper echelon pros would say.

this isnt about making the perfect action, by 'certainty' i mean understanding what decisions you need to make, confidence is another way of describing that

i shouldn't waste my time on this site with people like you, this forum is for discussion

1) The more you learn, the more certainty you will get. I imagine the percentage will plateau at some point.

2) Professionals usually always know what to do. There will be a few odd ball spots, but most of the time they just know.

3) The more passive and straight forward the player field the more certainty I have because it is easier to put players on a hand. Tricky aggressive players always keep me on my toes. I usually have a pretty good idea. Very rarely am I completely surprised by someone's hole cards or the way they played a certain hand.

I'm pretty certain what to do in most preflop spots to some degree. Postflop can be a bit trickier. I'm sure I do a bunch of stuff wrong, but I try and be somewhat balanced and not too spewy.

A really awesome book that may help is "Superforecasting" by Philip Tetlock. It isn't about poker but rather about people in the intelligence community who are able to accurately predict various complicated world events and at a fairly granular level. A good poker player would likely be a good forecaster and a good forecaster would likely be a good poker player. The skills are interchangeable.

Here is a decent/short article from the two plus two magazine about superforcastering and how it may relate to poker playing https://www.twoplustwo.com/magazine/...orecasting.php

I was mobile when I posted that so I figured I'd come back and give a bit more detail and possibly answer the questions directly.

1/2) I would say that great poker players do not think in terms of black and white but rather are great at probabilistic thinking. Knowing what the best action in any given situation is more about accurately weighing information, updating weights as new information is available, and being fairly granular about assinging probabilities to their thoughts than it is about having 100% certainty in all situations. Meaning they should rarely think situations are 50/50, 100%, or 0%. In fact assigning a 100%, 50%, or 0% probability to something is rather useless in most real world contexts where you do not have all of the information. I would also say that great poker players are great at counterfactual thinking. In fact one of the best HU poker players in the world, libratus, uses counterfactual regret minimization.

3) I personally play a style that is quite a bit different than i what I feel a lot of people play. A lot of people attempt to put player's on a range which has a fairly huge margin of error. Meaning if you have too many hands in a range(or not enough) that can cause a pretty huge gap between your play and the most optimal play in any given situation. Here is a video that describes some of the main points in my decision process when it comes to poker https://youtu.be/kn92WXcKr0M

I usually play short sessions of 250 or 300 hands. In those, it's not uncommon for me to have no difficult decisions whatsoever. I don't say that as a brag, though, because I know I'm still making lots of mistakes. (A GTO solver/bot could find my errors). I just don't realize I'm making them at the time. I'm essentially auto-piloting and going with my gut.
Sometimes I'll play sessions where there were a couple of 'weird' hands where I felt a bit lost, and for those I might do some analysis post-game. Those are also the kind of hands I like looking at in the hand analysis forums, because they force the reader to think more about ranges.

The point is that I rarely find myself in a spot where I have no idea what to do. Most of the "close" spots occur where betting/calling/folding/raising all have the same neutral/zero EV, so it doesn't really matter which option I choose.
When I was a beginner I found myself in "difficult" spots much more often, because I just hadn't been in them before.
If you're finding yourself in spots where you really have no idea if calling or folding is correct, you just need to play and study more (particularly the latter, imo) until you've learned from similar spots.

I'm gonna check this out sometime. Thanks for posting.

I had an 'a-ha!' moment 3 years after learning the game where I suddenly felt comfortable with the mechanics of posting blinds, raising, and orbiting the table. The little things started to become ingrained, and I had more thinking space to work out hand strategies. This is still an ongoing thing for me.

Basically, poker is a game of information. To a beginner -- a huge body of water with an inflatable raft. To a pro -- a cruise-liner, nothing worse than rain. It takes pain and dedication to adapt the dinky raft, but also time.