Logic vs. Intuition in Poker

A friend of mine once told me, “I don’t believe in all that ‘math’ either.”

We weren’t talking about poker, specifically, but it made me wonder… How do you not believe in math here in the 21st century?

Let me put it this way: You don’t have to believe in math because math is factual, and it exists regardless of whether or not you “believe” in it.

That’s why most, but not all, poker winners are logical players rather than intuitive players. In this post, I explain why poker trumps intuition in poker.

Why Older Poker Players Had to Rely on Intuition Over Logic

You’ll find intuitive poker players succeeding in poker rooms today, but they’re mostly older players. Many of them have never played a hand on the internet. They were raised up, so to speak, in an environment where intuition was rewarded.

When they learned poker, they didn’t have dozens or hundreds of books written about poker math and logic. And they sure didn’t have easy access to poker hand calculators or simulations. The idea of playing poker on a computer with players from all over the world and tracking the results of every hand would have been unimaginable at the time.

If you’re playing poker today, you have access to all those tools and more. You don’t need intuition. In fact, you can get more experience faster now than ever before. After all, poker hands are dealt twice as fast as hands in live poker games, and you can play multiple tables at once in an online poker room.

If you’re like some of the young online players I know, you’ve probably played more hands than any of the competitors in the World Series of Poker in the 1970s.

What’s the Difference Between Intuition and Logic?

You can think of “intuition” as being the same thing as instinct or a gut feeling that you get. It basically means getting knowledge via means other than logic or reason. An intuitive player might never give a second thought to how he comes to his decisions at the table.

Sometimes, this intuition is the result of experience. Even though good intuitive poker players don’t consciously think about a situation to compare and contrast it with other experiences he’s had in the past, his subconscious does the thinking for him. And it happens so fast that it looks like just a flash of insight.

You’ll even find some early poker books that advise you to trust your instincts and don’t change your mind even when faced with new information. Even though the writers of such books might have been great players, this can be terrible advice, especially to an inexperienced or new poker player.

Logic is different because it relies on reasoning and breaks down your thinking into manageable steps that you can explain to someone else. You do this kind of thinking in a specific order. And if you can’t explain your reasoning to another player, you need to think more logically.

Logic is a kind of math that works with the words “if” and “then.”

Where and How to Learn How to Play Logical Poker

Many, if not most, modern poker books are written with a logical approach to the game. If you’re serious about poker, you’ll read at least one poker book, probably The Theory of Poker by David Sklansky.

All these books have one thing in common:

They break your decision-making down into a step-by-step process using “if then” statements. They also assign probabilities to specific outcomes. The idea is to measure how much you stand to win versus how much you stand to lose in every situation.

This idea is called “expected value,” and it’s the crucial decision-making element in poker.

Here’s an example:

You’re playing Texas Hold’em and you’ve just flopped a four-card flush draw, and you have the ace of that suit. You know that you have a roughly 33% probability of hitting your flush and winning the hand. You also know that your opponent isn’t especially aggressive or loose. So, if he misses his hand, he’ll fold in the face of a raise. In fact, you estimate that if you raise, there’s at least a 50% probability he’ll fold.

You have enough ways to win here that it’s profitable to raise even though you might not have the best hand. If he doesn’t have a good hand, he’ll fold, and you’ll win the pot. If he does have a good hand, you’ll still draw out on him a third of the time. Raising is often the right move here.

You Should Know Why You’re Making Poker Decisions

All these books have something in common. They encourage you to think about WHY you’re making specific poker decisions. And you should be able to explain these decisions to someone else familiar with poker. Even if your thinking is wrong, it’s better to make decisions based on a thought process than it is to rely on gut instinct or luck.

After all, you can always eventually see a fallacy in your thought process and improve. If you rely on intuition, you’re relying on guesswork. And there’s no real way to become a better guesser.

I hired a friend of mine once to write poker strategy blog posts for one of my sites. It was a mistake because he worked part-time as a telephone psychic. And he wasn’t one of these telephone psychics who knew that it was all a sham. He really thought he had powers, and he thought he knew the secrets to helping other people tap into their latent psychic powers.

As you can imagine, his poker strategy advice was just malarkey. Meditating might help me win more at poker by making me more attentive and focused, but it’s not going to improve my ability to somehow guess what cards my opponent has via some kind of ESP.

Another Example of Logical Thinking in Texas Hold’em

I read a post about how Rolf Slotboom said you should play ace-king. He said most players always raise with big slick, but he prefers to limp in with the hand. He suggests limping preflop. He doesn’t want to force out players with A10 or KJ. He wants players with hands like those in the pot because his hand dominates them mathematically.

About one-third of the time, an ace or a king will hit on the flop, giving top pair with top kicker, which provides an opportunity to check raise.

This is an example of understanding what you’re going to do at each step in the game and why. The reasoning might or might not be incorrect, but it’s far superior to just guessing at what you’re going to do preflop with big slick.

Intuitive Poker Players Look Down at Logical Players

You’ll occasionally run into intuitive poker players who feel like they’re better at poker than logical players. They’ll even get angry with players who make decisions based on logic and math. You run into these kinds of people in public on social media all the time.

These poker players are the same folks who want to ignore science in favor of their preconceived notions and beliefs. Many of them are so afraid that their longheld beliefs or something their parents told them wasn’t right that they’re willing to do objectively dumb stuff. In fact, they’re not just willing to dumb stuff; they don’t even think it’s dumb. They’re living in a fantasy land.

I’m here to suggest that realistic poker players win more often than poker players who live in some kind of fantasy world.

A Funny Example of Intuition vs. Logic in Poker

I read a forum thread one time discussing logic versus intuition in poker. Someone mentioned that 90% of the players at the table don’t use logic when they’re playing. They’re playing intuitively instead.

Someone else chimed in and pointed out that he thought success in poker was 85% because of logic and 15% because of intuition.

The next person in the discussion scored the most points with me. His question about these percentages was simple:

Where did these percentages come from?

Are they just guesses based on intuition?

Here’s my opinion:

Of course they are. I doubt either of the people posting these percentages had spent any time conducting surveys or scientifically scoring players based on how logical versus intuitive they were with their decisions.

This just goes to show that you can’t count on everyone posting in a poker forum to be using logic correctly, either.

Spend Some Time on Some Poker Blogs and Forums

If you spend some time reading poker blogs with a lot of comments or forums with a lot of active users, and you’ll see plenty of hand histories being discussed. They’ll almost always be discussing the probabilities of various situations to put them into the context of expected value.

It’s not just websites that do this either. Open up the latest issue of Card Player magazine and see what the discussions of the hands offer. You’ll rarely see someone talking about how they made a great decision based on a feeling they had.

Some players might win using an intuitive approach, but I suggest that they’re not really intuitive players at all. They’re just very experienced and reason so fast that they don’t even realize they’re using logic in some kind of fast-paced, shorthand way.

But if you want to get good at poker, pay no attention to your hunches and start learning to think about the math of various situations in poker. Start writing down the situations you find yourself in and keep a record of the decisions you’ve made. Get some input from someone at a forum where most of the poker players discuss the math behind the game.

This is the surest way to start improving as a poker player.

Avoid These Mistakes When Thinking About Poker

If you can avoid some of these mistakes when thinking about poker, you’ll start winning more often faster. The first mistake is to think that your intuition somehow affects the math behind the game. It doesn’t.

You’re not nearly as intuitive as you think. If you’re convinced that you have some kind of psychic powers, you’re probably going to ignore my advice, anyway. But if you’re tired of losing, change your way of thinking and face reality. You’re not good at ESP, and you never were.

Conclusion

If you want to get good at poker, start learning how to think logically. It might even make sense to take a university course in logic and another university course in probability. Even if you don’t want to take such a course, you can find syllabi for such courses and buy the textbooks.

Also, start studying poker strategy books that explain the math and logic behind poker decisions in a step-by-step manner.

You’ll get way more out of that than you will trying to improve your intuition by burning incense and praying for intuition.