Now think about how many players you actually know who have feelings. Make a mental list. How many of them are really like that? I'd be surprised if you knew more than five players who are still successful.
The Monte Carlo simulation can count 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 one can make you a good poker player. It's not a learning style and it's not a way of being.
Yes, I know it's strange to consider someone who has good skills as lucky. So let's reserve that word for people who are supposedly poor players. Actually, if you look at the top 0.1%-feeling players, the ones who are very lucky, the set of good habits they have developed was purely a matter of luck. It was not in their hands. Even though they may now be good, solid, steady cash players, they may still be as lucky as the fish. The sentient player is not in control of his development. They do not choose to become good. If you take 100 of their career hands and treat their decisions as constant, they will only get one repetition, whereas the theoretical player will get 20 of them.
This is why players who are driven by feelings are disappearing. You hear much less about them now than before. In general, the "life expectancy" of feeling players is very short. After all, if your conditioning and learning has been mostly incidental, why do you think it will continue 
as the game evolves? In that sense, it is like a comet. It can be brightly lit for a while, and that draws your attention, but the comet disappears as quickly as it appears. It is worth noting that it is becoming harder and harder for a player who is driven by feelings to reach the highest limits, as poker becomes more and more complex and more players resort to sophisticated strategies based on game theory and exploitations. Strategies that worked three years ago at the high limits are now no longer going to work even at the 2$/4$ limits.
Poker is changing. The fact that you are interested in poker theory probably means that you are on the good side of change. Even 10 years ago, the conversations that are happening today seemed absurd, reductionist and not at all "about what poker is". Don't get me wrong. I am not saying that intuition is irrelevant or that "gut feeling" plays no role in our decisions. It does. There are many situations in which our subconscious is far superior to what our conscious will ever be. Theory is slow and clumsy and most of the time we don't have time to do a full hande calculation before we make a decision. Then there are games like PLO, which is so complex that it is impossible to run EV simulations in most flop scenarios. We travel through poker unconsciously all the time and feel the territory with our gut feeling much faster than with our brain. But we also have to remember that as poker players, we have set ourselves the task of doing everything we can to get better.
Poker, rake and chance work against us. So we have to have every tool in our repertoire, theory is probably the strongest tool. All "theoretical" players use feelings, without them they would be hopelessly slow. But theory, properly oriented, is the driver that directs the real power of feelings.
One of the best advantages of theory is the ability to reduce stochastics (statistics and probability theory) in poker feedback. Without theory, you may be influenced not to make that checkraise again, but with a firm grasp of theory, you will realise that even if the hand didn't work, in EV terms, it worked in the long run. By learning the theory, you no longer have to be exposed to the randomness and noise of poker, but can instead shape your game closer to real poker.
In reality, at high limits, there are probably no sentient players left at all. The binary opposition of theory versus sentience is now something of a fantasy. Every serious player these days has some form of theory 
the fundamentals that guide their play. Some, like Ilari, may have less of it than his rivals. And how do I know if Ilari'is is guided by feelings? I don't know, probably his theory is just a different form. In the end, these things are hard to measure and in fact most of them come simply from perception.
The main point is that feeling is not a sure way to become a good player. It is not a learning style. Familiarity is omnipresent and necessary for every player and always will be, but familiarity alone is like "catching" success. So, how do you become a good player? Is theory the only right way? That's the subject of the next article.
Haseeb Qureshi
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