What is ‘feel’?
You often hear the phrase from poker players about the ‘feel’ they get in certain spots or against certain players. To be honest, I think that a lot of the time, players use the phrase ‘feel’ to somehow defend a play which they know deep down was incorrect. If only I had a pound for every time I’ve seen someone call a pot sized bet to then hit their gutshot on the river and then make some bollocks reasoning of how they ‘felt’ they needed to call!!
I write this as I just called a large river bet in Omaha holding only two pair when the board was set up perfectly for a broadway straight which obviously my opponent had. Why did I call this bet? Because pre-flop I had a good ‘feeling’ about the hand. As I type this, the ridiculousness of my actions is becoming clearer by the second!
I consider myself to be of slightly above average intelligence and somewhat logical and analytical. How then do I make such a poor decision, simply because I had some silly feeling about a hand of poker based on no logical reasoning whatsoever? I don’t have the answer really, but basically, I think it’s the fact that although Poker is a pretty technical game, emotional control is almost, if not more important than the fundamental grasp of statistics and probability.
I remember having a discussion about feel on the UKPI forum a while back, and Kev Stevens (Devilmeat) put forward the point that feel is a subconscious understanding of a situation based upon many hours of play and study. I actually think this is a very good way of describing the aspect of feel but I would say that this sort of feel is the sort of thing that can make a good player great. Unfortunately for me, whenever I try and play with ‘feel’ it makes an average player poor!
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[...] unknown wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptYou often hear the phrase from poker players about the ‘feel’ they get in certain spots or against certain players. To be honest, I think that a lot of the. [...]
[...] Dan wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptYou often hear the phrase from poker players about the ‘feel’ they get in certain spots or against certain players. To be honest, I think that a lot of the. [...]