Now think about how many players you actually know who rely on their feelings. Make a list in your mind. How many of them are really like that? I would be surprised if you knew more than five players who are still successful.
The Monte Carlo simulation can calculate how many such players exist statistically. But that doesn't mean you have to take everything seriously. As with other experiments, the question is not whether it actually happened. The question is whether being such a player can make you a good poker player. It is not a learning style and not a way to be.
Yes, I know it's strange to consider someone with good skills as lucky. So let's reserve this word for people who are supposedly bad players. In fact, if you look at the top 0.1% of feeling players, those who are very successful, their set of good habits was purely a matter of luck. It was not in their hands. Even if they can now be good, solid, consistent cash players, they can still be as lucky as fish. A feeling player does not control their development. They do not choose to become good. If you take 100 of their career hands, keeping their decisions constant, such players will succeed in only one iteration, while a theoretical player will succeed in 20 of them.
That's why feeling players are disappearing. Now you hear about them much less often than before. Overall, the “lifespan” of feeling players is very short. After all, if your conditioning and learning were mostly random, why do you think it will continue 
as the game evolves? In this sense, it is like a comet. It can burn brightly for a while, and it catches your attention, but that comet disappears as quickly as it appears. It is worth mentioning that it is becoming increasingly difficult for a feeling player to reach the highest limits, as poker is becoming more complex and more players are using complex strategies based on game theory and exploitation. Strategies that worked at high limits three years ago will no longer help even at $2/$4 limits.
Poker is changing. The fact that you are interested in poker theory probably means you are on the good side of the changes. Just 10 years ago, the conversations that take place today seemed absurd, reductionist, and not “about what poker is.” Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that intuition is unimportant or that “feeling” plays no role in our decisions. It does. There are many situations where our subconscious is much superior to our consciousness ever will be. Theory is slow and cumbersome, and we often don't have time to do full calculations in a hand before making a decision. There are also games like PLO, which are so complex that it is impossible to do EV simulations in many flop scenarios. We constantly navigate poker unconsciously and feel the territory with our intuition much faster than with our brains. But we also have to remember that as poker players, we have set ourselves the task of doing everything we can to become better.
Poker, rake, and randomness work against us. So, we must have every tool in our repertoire, and theory is probably the strongest tool. All “theoretical” players use feelings; without them, they would be hopelessly slow. But properly oriented theory is the driver, directing the true power of feelings.
One of the best advantages of theory is the ability to reduce stochasticity (statistics and probability theory) in poker feedback. Without theory, you might be influenced not to make that check-raise anymore, but with a solid understanding of theory, you will understand that even if this hand didn't work out, in EV terms, it worked out in the long run. By learning theory, you no longer need to experience randomness and other poker noise; instead, you can shape your game closer to true poker.
In reality, at high limits, there are probably no feeling players left at all. The binary opposition of theory versus feeling is now somewhat of a fantasy. Every serious player today has some form of theoretical 
foundation that they follow while playing. Some, like Ilari, may have less of it than their opponents. And how do I know if Ilari relies on feelings? I don't know; probably his theory is just of a different form. Ultimately, these things are hard to measure, and to be honest, most of them come just from perception.
The most important thing is that feeling is not a reliable way to become a good player. It is not a learning style. Feeling is ubiquitous and necessary for every player and always will be, but feeling alone is like “catching luck.” So, how do you become a good player? Is theory the only right way? More on that in the next article.
Haseeb Qureshi
