Emotion and competence in poker

As we have discussed before, there are four phases of learning in order to master any skill:

1. Unconscious incompetence
2. Deliberate incompetence
3. Conscious competence
4. Unconscious competence

Let's take a look at the autopilot state for a moment. In poker, we refer to autopilot as unconscious competence or, in poker, "muscle memory". When you go on autopilot, your game is defined only by the skills you have mastered at level 4. Anything not yet mastered at that level (e.g. skills mastered at the Conscious Competence level) will simply be removed from your game.

So, if your flop checkraising game crashes on autopilot, it shows that these skills are not yet developed to level 4. Although autopilot is usually seen as a bad thing, it is invaluable for figuring out which parts of the game are fully automatic and which are not yet.

When you're playing your A-game and the autopilot is off, you're constantly having a conscious conversation with yourself. This conversation gives you access to all the skills of conscious competence in poker, "Here's a good spot to checkraise" or "Here he is, better fold". It is important to stress that in poker, there is no goal to get all the fat out of your head. Here, unlike in activities such as juggling or dancing, where we have a goal to "get out of our heads" and "be in the moment". The conversation that takes place in a good poker game is essential to better master the skills that are at the level of conscious competence.

The neurological differences between conscious and unconscious processes are not yet well understood, but we are well aware that they are quite different. O Understanding their differences is crucial to managing your game well.

Consider the difference between driving a car to work in the morning and driving a car during a storm. On a normal day, you are driving very inattentively, perhaps listening to music or talking to passengers. But in a storm, you probably turn off the music, stretch out in your seat and concentrate fully on the task at hand. When you are fully focused on driving, you are using all your resources to control the car. Skills such as excellent steering, reactive decision-making or adapting to weather and visibility conditions are often skills that drivers have not mastered at the level of unconscious compartmentalisation. We intuitively recognise that these are beyond our unconscious competence. Thus, we adjust our level of concentration according to the needs or dangers of a given task.

You might want to argue that poker is more of a mind game, not a physical activity like driving a car. But how is it that this mental game can be automated by our muscle memory in such a way that we don't even have to think about it? The process of "biting" would help explain this phenomenon. In this process, large amounts of information are broken down into individual mental units.

A good example of this is analysing starting hands. When you first played no-limit hold'em and you looked at a hand like A7o, you understood it as "I have an ace and a seven". You may have thought that each of these cards could hit a pair and decided that would be pretty good. But now that you're an experienced poker player who has dealt with a lot of A7s, you treat A7s not as two separate cards, but as a single, clear "bite". So it's quick and easy to think about how the A7o "bite" looks against the other cards - A5, AJ, 78, KQ, etc.

The more poker we play, the larger and more complex our units of information can become. As you continue to gain experience, you will begin to understand flops as separate units, e.g. J87 will become such a frequently played flop that you will no longer analyse it card by card, but will see it as a single unit. And when a 2 comes up in a tournament, you no longer have to analyse that card individually, because you know exactly how you should play your JT when you have J87 + low blank. Once something is classified as a "bite", you no longer have to consciously analyse it, and your hand processing speeds up considerably. You no longer have to think "What am I going to beat and what am I no longer playing in this board, how many hand combinations are there against me?", instead you just unconsciously "feel" the strength of your hand on this board and play accordingly.

Once a skill has moved into unconscious competence, it is almost always combined into a larger "bite (piece of information)". And since such aggregation of information requires deeper experience, the only way to reach the level of unconscious competence is to spend thousands of hours analysing situations until eventually the analysis itself crystallises into units. Then such places will be unconsciously resolved.

So when I ask you "Why do you think A83 is a bad board for chechraise?" you probably won't have an immediate answer, you'll probably feel it intuitively. It will be part of some piece of information in your head that you just "feel". But if you think about it for a second, you will explain in retrospect: "Well, if I chckraise in a borad like this, I'll be representing very few hands, with aces I could check/call, and if my opponent had bigger aces he'd raise preflop".

We all have solutions that have been handed over to "feel", but most of us can still reproduce the necessary theory if we need to analyse something. According to popular myth, a player who relies on feelings cannot do this.

Haseeb Qureshi

Where is the best place to play poker?