Free Your Mind

When I first started regularly playing poker six or seven years ago (outside of home games) I was a combination live-and-online player. Over time I transitioned into being almost exclusively a live player. What it comes down to for me is "feel".

All the hours logged at live tables has helped refine my poker intuition, what I like to think of as my Spidey Sense. There's nothing mysical about the Spidey Sense of course. It's just a combination of hand-reading abilities and the subconscious brain taking all of the available data in an information-rich environment -- a live poker table -- and saying, "Hey buddy. We've been down this road before. Here's what happened."

The hard part is learning to quiet the mind and to trust the Spidey Sense because it doesn't stay at the subconscious level. It manifests itself in the thinking brain. Spider-Man doesn't have to worry about that. His Spidey Sense activates, alerting him to some danger, and he responds instinctively. With poker I still have to make a conscious choice to call, bet, raise or fold, and sometimes my conscious brain overrides my poker intuition.

Last week at Venetian I faced an all-in bet at the river. My AdQd led the betting pre-flop, on the flop, and on the turn. At the river one opponent was still in the pot with me and all I had on a board of Kd-4h-Jd-7c-Jh was the nut no-pair.

I felt if my opponent had a "made hand" (medium pair, weak king, or a jack) then he would definitely call a bet. The spot for him to fold those hands was on the turn. It seemed that the only hands that would fold were hands that I already could beat and that wouldn't pay me off, namely missed draws. Not seeing much value in betting, I checked.

My opponent then moved all in for his last $109. It was a very curious move to me because I had expected him to check behind. I wish I could tell you that I tried to analyze the whole hand, narrowing his range to either a jack or a missed draw. Certainly I took my time, asked for a count and pondered my decision. My intuition told me -- based on everything I had observed in the hand -- that this guy was making a move with a busted draw. The problem is that my conscious mind got in on the act too.

"Are you really going to call this bet with ace-high?" I asked myself. Harkening back to a hand late on Day 2 at the 2009 APT Macau Main Event, I continued with, "Who do you think you are, J.C. Tran?"

In the end I didn't make the Tran hero call. I folded. My opponent triumphantly showed down what he thought was a masterful bluff with 2d-4d (hello, PokerGrump!) -- a busted flush draw that happened to also be the best hand by virtue of an "emergency" bottom pair.

Feel. Intuition. That's what those thousands of hands and hundreds of hours at the table all represent. I made the wrong decision here and it saved me $109 (another problematic aspect to poker to be tackled another day). But if I had it to do over again, I'd like to hope that I'd be able to trust my intuition and make the "right" call. Otherwise what's the point of spending all that time at the table?