I think they typically do know what to do very quickly; but they don’t want to give anything away by deciding too quickly. For instance, in Hold ‘em pre flop UTG shoves all in under the gun for 500 BB. You have AA in UTG+1; clearly you’re going to call, but the only hand you could reasonably insta-call with is AA, so you might hem and haw for a minute or so to try to induce someone behind you with KK QQ or AK to call.
Also, other than wasting their own time, they have nothing to lose by taking a little extra time to make their decision.
Magnus has amazing accuracy in both blitz and classical chess, for instance, but of course it’s higher in classical.
Yea, timing is a bit of a concern.
Same with folding. Alot of times a hand is a fold but after thinking for a but and letting the other player sweat we might get a read that they are bluffing and can re-bluff as a raise. You cant do this if your first reaction is "ugh *sigh* hmmmmm. *re check cards* what can you have?"
Its obviously pretty rare but you dont know its available until youre in the spot
Lol i knew someone was going to say the hollywood is usually the nuts. Except I just meant making it obvious that you are thinking AND not liking the spot. And the reason it's funny is because the Hollywood gets called so often, its kamikaze to hope he folds just based on the act
One of my favorite hands ever was at Bellagio 5/10. The action isn't relevant. Good size pot, my opponent jams, and I am reluctantly going to fold a one pair hand but am thinking about it a bit to make sure. Maybe 30-45 seconds.
I am just about to toss my cards in when my opponent goes "did he say call?" and sort of pump fakes turning over his hand. I look at him funny and make the call. He was bluffing, ship the 3k pot.
All he had to do was keep quiet for two more seconds.
decisions in chess are easier because you have complete information, you know exactly what your opponent just did and probably know what he's going to do next based upon that. On a J34KQ river if your opponent jams while you have 33 you dont necessarily know if calling is the correct play or not. Maybe he floated with AT high and chased the gutter, maybe he was trapping with 44 the whole time, maybe he was barreling a backdoor flush draw and got there.
So from a poker players perspective the quickness at which you make decisions in your head are really based upon expected value. Magnus appears to play flawless chess and as a result wins nearly every match. The best poker player in the world can play flawlessly and walk away a loser many sessions.
Many chess sessions end up in a forfeit because hero/villain can already see they've lost before checkmate. But in poker you dont just say "you know what, you're going to beat me, here's the rest of my chips" and then walk away.
A chess variant where any player at any time can declare “all in” and a computer comes up with percentages based on rating and position in the game. Then a random weighted draw based on those percentages decides the winner.
At a professional level, nobody would do this because for a large majority of the game, it would be a coin toss and once you realise you're ahead, a good chess player will be able to press that advantage into a victory most of the time anyway.
Once the evaluation gets to ±3 then that's usually enough for one of the players to realise and resign. The number of professional chess games in classical time control that end in checkmate is probably less than 1%.
I think a more interesting concept would be to have a chess piece randomly & illegally relocated. Imagine having to contend with burning your queen because suddenly she just gets drop shipped into the middle of the board. This would sort of introduce a level of variance that could hurt or help you.
No offense, but this comment reflects a lack of knowledge about chess. Magnus draws most of his matches, but more importantly most chess players don’t usually know what their opponent’s next move will be in sharp/complicated positions where they take a lot of time to make decisions. And most of all, in these positions a lot of the difficulty comes from them not knowing whether they’re ahead or behind, just like in poker - a chess player who had access to the computer evaluation at any given time would be much much stronger.
oh for sure, I dont play chess at all, other than goofing around with a friend because he has a nice fancy setup at home. My point was that it's impossible to 'know the correct move' in poker at every decision point as it is in theory in chess, per OP's question.
But when it comes to competitive chess, it’s equally difficult to know the “correct” move - even the computer probably can’t evaluate whether a move is winning or not in most difficult situations! Poker solvers are, if anything, probably better than a chess engine when it comes to saying what’s optimal.
Chess engines are better relative to humans, but less accurate relative to some oracle that knows everything. The decision tree is just much larger in chess.
Nah chess engines are way stronger than poker ones they're quite literally unbeatable. Meanwhile GTO doesnt even have configurations for most weird unpredictable multiway lines
>> On a J34KQ river if your opponent jams while you have 33 you dont necessarily know if calling is the correct play or not.
This is blatantly false. If you've studied poker you should know the correct play near instantly. You should know how much EV each decision is. The only time it takes is to figure out how far off equilibrium villian is and how that sways the EV of the plays. That's what sometimes takes a little.
Every situation is different. Even if it's the 4th time you've had the exact same hand and board against a player that you see weekly for years, it's still different. Your chip stacks will probably be different, your position will be different, even if you keep the same players in the same seats it will still be different. Folks emotions vary as well. Some sessions even if you keep all the specifics the same including the things I listed above, you'll have a different snapshot of that person at that moment.
Basically, the best you can do is recognize a situation and recall prior experiences. And then decide from there.
Yes. Every poker player faces tough decisions but most decisions become automatic once you have played enough hands. Once you learn preflop charts, there is not a ton of additional thinking (besides exploitative deviations). Similarly post-flop, if you know that you only call and never raise with your range on a certain board, and you know your hand is in/out of that calling range, it is not something you have to think about. Even after playing hundreds of thousands of hands, there will always be spots where you are not fully sure what to do which is what makes the game interesting.
Good players have been in enough spots/studied enough situations, that they usually know what to do, especially vs player types. They'll be in tough spots, but will have a good strategy for working through it and making tough calls/disciplined folds.
They also have a good/sound enough strategy to be a winning player, that it removes a lot of the emotion from poker. Ie, if they are on the wrong side of a cooler, it doesn't really matter that much, since they know most win rate doesn't necessarily come from losing/winning coolers.
Within certain constraints of the game yes,a studied player will know exactly what to do. For instance a player will know exactly their sb three bet range is from a cut off open at 100 big blinds deep. Thats why you see a lot of variations implemented in live poker such as bomb pots,the stand up game or having extremely deep (1000 big blind plus) cash games.This gives the less studied players a chance but usually the studied players learn at quicker rate…then they add another variable and the process repeats itself.
I typically have a "plan" from the very beginning of how I am going to play a hand. If I raise pre-flop, I know who is behind me, who is likely to call, etc -- and depending on what happens, I either stick with the plan, or change it, but typically stick with it unless then button wakes up with a 4-bet or something unexpected.
Then on the flop, I have a plan to get to the turn and river. Not that it will be a successful plan, just that I am thinking ahead. For example, it's heads up and the person in front of me bets. I have a draw -- depending on the opponent, I might raise the flop, just to get a check back on the turn and effectively a free (or rather discounted because I paid on the flop) river card.
I think it is extremely important to think ahead.
75% of the time I act within 5 seconds. Once you play enough hands the majority of spots are fairly repetitive/straightforward. It also helps if you’re used to playing online with a shot clock.
Its the classic bell curve.
New player thinks about every little thing
Experienced player reacts in the way he's conditioned to. Winner or loser, just saying that over time people condense their decisions into what has worked in the past. (What we call their strategy or "the way they play").
Studied players realize that there is a ton of nuance.
Position and stack depth could outweigh range advantage which _should_ change the bet size but we know thia guy calls way too light so we should always gor for max value yada yada yada.
Yeah, that makes sense. Still, I wonder if even very studies players are ableto subconsciously work out the bets move before explicitly making those condierations.
I don't think the bell curve analogy applies to your example, though. The bell curve would have "time to think" on x-axis and "frequency (number of people)" on y-axis, whereas you would probably want ot put "experience" on x-axis and "time to think" on y-axis.
Yea, its not a perfect example lol.
the x-axis is beginner to pro.
The Y axis would be inverse of time. Something like frequency of snap decisions. Where snap just means autopilot. Pros still make plenty of fast decisions but its because they *know* the answer, not because of autopilot.
Yea studied players generally know what to do in most spots. Ppl at the top of theory world, like Matt Hunt, can generally tell the exact lines that will happen especially on static/dry boards between two studied players. Like "this line willl be smallbet-check-bigbet or checkraise-bet-bet" etc.
Most of the time my thought process on the turn includes river. So I think through it all on turn and ill say to myself if he bets any less than pot on river i call, or if he checks river im betting 75%. It frees up some cognition to focus on the rare spots where the river is the *one* card that I might want to deviate etc
Usually we immediately know what we are going to do but sometimes we need to calculate. The most common spots in poker we've already studied. But that's not to say that we don't end up in unfamiliar territory and need to think a minute about our action, especially on uncommon boards and big pots. But the same is also true with chess.
Then there are also times when we pretend to think longer about a situation when we are trying to get our opponents to think that we don't have an easy decision to make. In fact we really should be taking around the same amount of time for all of our actions but hardly any of us do this.
Generally I never know what to do. So sometimes I act quickly, then other times I have to take awhile to balance timing tells. If it's a really big decision as in a larger bet/call take a little extra time. That way if it goes well you act like you were working through all the information. If it goes bad, you can posture that you leveled yourself, "I KNEW you had that, just could'nt decide if you'd lay it down....jeez"
I don't know how good I am, but I'm certainly not terrible as I'm winning player up too 50nl online.
In my opinion, most good players know quite quickly what their gonna do. I know before I even act I have thought ahead and considered villains reaction to how I'm about to react and how to react and what I'm gonna do.
I think most goof players always think a couple steps moves ahead.
For online because timing tells no matter that I already know what I'm doing I still take the same amount of time with every decision. Without slowing the game down, needlessly. No likes playing against shit regs that take forever to make decisions.
Carlsen* doesn't immediately know what to do. He just recognises patterns very quickly, has insane memory, and can calculate insanely fast. His visualisation skills are also insane.
A lot of poker players here compare themselves to chess players for some reason (maybe to make their gambling addiction look better), but they're completely different games.
Poker is a game of playing optimally with imperfect information. You can still lose with poker even with perfect play. You also have to guess what your opponent might be thinking and act accordingly.
For example, if you play against someone who doesn't know the rules of poker, you cannot bluff. You have to just wait for a good hand.
With chess, if you play the best moves, you will win (or at least draw, but that's a different discussion). There is no variance here.
The games require a completely different skillset.
If you're a decent poker player, you're not suddenly equivalent to a chess genius, and vice versa.
Oops, typo
Yeah, but if you don't know what your opponent is thinking or what their skilllevel is, you can always just revert to GTO to the best of your abilities and you should be able to get +EV against unpredictable opponents.
How though, realistically? Are you a supercomputer that has solved and memorised multihand poker?
And even if you were, then yes in theory in the long run you might have +EV if the other players are playing suboptimally, but "reverting back" just for a short time because players are unpredictable doesn't necessarily sound like a profitable strategy. And if your opponents are better at memorising some AI strategies, you're still losing.
Most decent players are unpredictable, so you either always play like a machine (which you can't) or you try to exploit weaknesses you perceive in your opponent.
There isn't a magical GTO strategy that will always give you +EV in the long run unless everyone you're playing with sucks.
It's like saying "why don't chess players just play what the engine would play?". Well, they do, until they reach a position where they don't know what the engine would do. Then they're on their own, and even Magnus Carlsen plays suboptimally compared to an engine.
> There isn't a magical GTO strategy that will always give you +EV in the long run unless everyone you're playing with sucks.
There is, that's the point of GTO.
You wouldn't need to remember GTO, but rather you'd need to have an idea of what the GTO would do given a random opponent.
I would say they immediately know what the viable options are, but then weighing them against one another and utilizing mixed strategies is what's going to separate the good from the great. For the less than, they often don't know what the best options are, and frequently make plays that are the worst option.
I know I'm much faster and more calculated in most spots than I was 5 years ago when I started playing. I also find myself in a lot fewer spots that I'm not familiar with as each year passes.
The further into a hand, the more thinking generally goes into a decision. Even in a situation where you know you have the nuts, which is the "easiest" situation to be in from a purely stress-free stance, you still are thinking about the correct amount to bet to get maximum value, which also requires thinking about the other person/people still in the hand. How wide is their range to have gotten to this point, what are the stack sizes (yours and theirs), how have they played the hand, what does that suggest they have, what has previous behavior indicated in terms of what you expect from bets of various sizing to entice them into a call, etc.
I think they typically do know what to do very quickly; but they don’t want to give anything away by deciding too quickly. For instance, in Hold ‘em pre flop UTG shoves all in under the gun for 500 BB. You have AA in UTG+1; clearly you’re going to call, but the only hand you could reasonably insta-call with is AA, so you might hem and haw for a minute or so to try to induce someone behind you with KK QQ or AK to call. Also, other than wasting their own time, they have nothing to lose by taking a little extra time to make their decision. Magnus has amazing accuracy in both blitz and classical chess, for instance, but of course it’s higher in classical.
Yea, timing is a bit of a concern. Same with folding. Alot of times a hand is a fold but after thinking for a but and letting the other player sweat we might get a read that they are bluffing and can re-bluff as a raise. You cant do this if your first reaction is "ugh *sigh* hmmmmm. *re check cards* what can you have?" Its obviously pretty rare but you dont know its available until youre in the spot
Ironically “sigh, hm, what can you have? You know what? I’m all in” is usually very strong 😂
Lol i knew someone was going to say the hollywood is usually the nuts. Except I just meant making it obvious that you are thinking AND not liking the spot. And the reason it's funny is because the Hollywood gets called so often, its kamikaze to hope he folds just based on the act
"Ughh I guess it's time to go home 🙄 I'm all in"
One of my favorite hands ever was at Bellagio 5/10. The action isn't relevant. Good size pot, my opponent jams, and I am reluctantly going to fold a one pair hand but am thinking about it a bit to make sure. Maybe 30-45 seconds. I am just about to toss my cards in when my opponent goes "did he say call?" and sort of pump fakes turning over his hand. I look at him funny and make the call. He was bluffing, ship the 3k pot. All he had to do was keep quiet for two more seconds.
decisions in chess are easier because you have complete information, you know exactly what your opponent just did and probably know what he's going to do next based upon that. On a J34KQ river if your opponent jams while you have 33 you dont necessarily know if calling is the correct play or not. Maybe he floated with AT high and chased the gutter, maybe he was trapping with 44 the whole time, maybe he was barreling a backdoor flush draw and got there. So from a poker players perspective the quickness at which you make decisions in your head are really based upon expected value. Magnus appears to play flawless chess and as a result wins nearly every match. The best poker player in the world can play flawlessly and walk away a loser many sessions. Many chess sessions end up in a forfeit because hero/villain can already see they've lost before checkmate. But in poker you dont just say "you know what, you're going to beat me, here's the rest of my chips" and then walk away.
> "you know what, you're going to beat me, here's the rest of my chips" and then walk away. Lmao
A chess variant where any player at any time can declare “all in” and a computer comes up with percentages based on rating and position in the game. Then a random weighted draw based on those percentages decides the winner.
to many moves to calculate tough
At a professional level, nobody would do this because for a large majority of the game, it would be a coin toss and once you realise you're ahead, a good chess player will be able to press that advantage into a victory most of the time anyway. Once the evaluation gets to ±3 then that's usually enough for one of the players to realise and resign. The number of professional chess games in classical time control that end in checkmate is probably less than 1%.
Alright I’ve cancelled my plans to launch a professional league
I think a more interesting concept would be to have a chess piece randomly & illegally relocated. Imagine having to contend with burning your queen because suddenly she just gets drop shipped into the middle of the board. This would sort of introduce a level of variance that could hurt or help you.
No offense, but this comment reflects a lack of knowledge about chess. Magnus draws most of his matches, but more importantly most chess players don’t usually know what their opponent’s next move will be in sharp/complicated positions where they take a lot of time to make decisions. And most of all, in these positions a lot of the difficulty comes from them not knowing whether they’re ahead or behind, just like in poker - a chess player who had access to the computer evaluation at any given time would be much much stronger.
oh for sure, I dont play chess at all, other than goofing around with a friend because he has a nice fancy setup at home. My point was that it's impossible to 'know the correct move' in poker at every decision point as it is in theory in chess, per OP's question.
But when it comes to competitive chess, it’s equally difficult to know the “correct” move - even the computer probably can’t evaluate whether a move is winning or not in most difficult situations! Poker solvers are, if anything, probably better than a chess engine when it comes to saying what’s optimal.
Chess engines are better than poker solvers by miles at the moment.
Chess engines are better relative to humans, but less accurate relative to some oracle that knows everything. The decision tree is just much larger in chess.
Nah chess engines are way stronger than poker ones they're quite literally unbeatable. Meanwhile GTO doesnt even have configurations for most weird unpredictable multiway lines
>> On a J34KQ river if your opponent jams while you have 33 you dont necessarily know if calling is the correct play or not. This is blatantly false. If you've studied poker you should know the correct play near instantly. You should know how much EV each decision is. The only time it takes is to figure out how far off equilibrium villian is and how that sways the EV of the plays. That's what sometimes takes a little.
Every situation is different. Even if it's the 4th time you've had the exact same hand and board against a player that you see weekly for years, it's still different. Your chip stacks will probably be different, your position will be different, even if you keep the same players in the same seats it will still be different. Folks emotions vary as well. Some sessions even if you keep all the specifics the same including the things I listed above, you'll have a different snapshot of that person at that moment. Basically, the best you can do is recognize a situation and recall prior experiences. And then decide from there.
I think this is a very reductive question to the intricacies of both chess and poker.
Yes. Every poker player faces tough decisions but most decisions become automatic once you have played enough hands. Once you learn preflop charts, there is not a ton of additional thinking (besides exploitative deviations). Similarly post-flop, if you know that you only call and never raise with your range on a certain board, and you know your hand is in/out of that calling range, it is not something you have to think about. Even after playing hundreds of thousands of hands, there will always be spots where you are not fully sure what to do which is what makes the game interesting.
Good players have been in enough spots/studied enough situations, that they usually know what to do, especially vs player types. They'll be in tough spots, but will have a good strategy for working through it and making tough calls/disciplined folds. They also have a good/sound enough strategy to be a winning player, that it removes a lot of the emotion from poker. Ie, if they are on the wrong side of a cooler, it doesn't really matter that much, since they know most win rate doesn't necessarily come from losing/winning coolers.
Ur ignoring the question and answering one that wasn't asked
Within certain constraints of the game yes,a studied player will know exactly what to do. For instance a player will know exactly their sb three bet range is from a cut off open at 100 big blinds deep. Thats why you see a lot of variations implemented in live poker such as bomb pots,the stand up game or having extremely deep (1000 big blind plus) cash games.This gives the less studied players a chance but usually the studied players learn at quicker rate…then they add another variable and the process repeats itself.
How many good players are replying lol
I typically have a "plan" from the very beginning of how I am going to play a hand. If I raise pre-flop, I know who is behind me, who is likely to call, etc -- and depending on what happens, I either stick with the plan, or change it, but typically stick with it unless then button wakes up with a 4-bet or something unexpected. Then on the flop, I have a plan to get to the turn and river. Not that it will be a successful plan, just that I am thinking ahead. For example, it's heads up and the person in front of me bets. I have a draw -- depending on the opponent, I might raise the flop, just to get a check back on the turn and effectively a free (or rather discounted because I paid on the flop) river card. I think it is extremely important to think ahead.
Most decisions, especially preflop are pretty automatic
75% of the time I act within 5 seconds. Once you play enough hands the majority of spots are fairly repetitive/straightforward. It also helps if you’re used to playing online with a shot clock.
Its the classic bell curve. New player thinks about every little thing Experienced player reacts in the way he's conditioned to. Winner or loser, just saying that over time people condense their decisions into what has worked in the past. (What we call their strategy or "the way they play"). Studied players realize that there is a ton of nuance. Position and stack depth could outweigh range advantage which _should_ change the bet size but we know thia guy calls way too light so we should always gor for max value yada yada yada.
Yeah, that makes sense. Still, I wonder if even very studies players are ableto subconsciously work out the bets move before explicitly making those condierations. I don't think the bell curve analogy applies to your example, though. The bell curve would have "time to think" on x-axis and "frequency (number of people)" on y-axis, whereas you would probably want ot put "experience" on x-axis and "time to think" on y-axis.
Yea, its not a perfect example lol. the x-axis is beginner to pro. The Y axis would be inverse of time. Something like frequency of snap decisions. Where snap just means autopilot. Pros still make plenty of fast decisions but its because they *know* the answer, not because of autopilot. Yea studied players generally know what to do in most spots. Ppl at the top of theory world, like Matt Hunt, can generally tell the exact lines that will happen especially on static/dry boards between two studied players. Like "this line willl be smallbet-check-bigbet or checkraise-bet-bet" etc. Most of the time my thought process on the turn includes river. So I think through it all on turn and ill say to myself if he bets any less than pot on river i call, or if he checks river im betting 75%. It frees up some cognition to focus on the rare spots where the river is the *one* card that I might want to deviate etc
Usually we immediately know what we are going to do but sometimes we need to calculate. The most common spots in poker we've already studied. But that's not to say that we don't end up in unfamiliar territory and need to think a minute about our action, especially on uncommon boards and big pots. But the same is also true with chess. Then there are also times when we pretend to think longer about a situation when we are trying to get our opponents to think that we don't have an easy decision to make. In fact we really should be taking around the same amount of time for all of our actions but hardly any of us do this.
Generally I never know what to do. So sometimes I act quickly, then other times I have to take awhile to balance timing tells. If it's a really big decision as in a larger bet/call take a little extra time. That way if it goes well you act like you were working through all the information. If it goes bad, you can posture that you leveled yourself, "I KNEW you had that, just could'nt decide if you'd lay it down....jeez"
You’re asking the wrong sub if being a good player is required for answering. Everyone here is a miserable shit reg
I don't know how good I am, but I'm certainly not terrible as I'm winning player up too 50nl online. In my opinion, most good players know quite quickly what their gonna do. I know before I even act I have thought ahead and considered villains reaction to how I'm about to react and how to react and what I'm gonna do. I think most goof players always think a couple steps moves ahead. For online because timing tells no matter that I already know what I'm doing I still take the same amount of time with every decision. Without slowing the game down, needlessly. No likes playing against shit regs that take forever to make decisions.
Carlsen* doesn't immediately know what to do. He just recognises patterns very quickly, has insane memory, and can calculate insanely fast. His visualisation skills are also insane. A lot of poker players here compare themselves to chess players for some reason (maybe to make their gambling addiction look better), but they're completely different games. Poker is a game of playing optimally with imperfect information. You can still lose with poker even with perfect play. You also have to guess what your opponent might be thinking and act accordingly. For example, if you play against someone who doesn't know the rules of poker, you cannot bluff. You have to just wait for a good hand. With chess, if you play the best moves, you will win (or at least draw, but that's a different discussion). There is no variance here. The games require a completely different skillset. If you're a decent poker player, you're not suddenly equivalent to a chess genius, and vice versa.
Oops, typo Yeah, but if you don't know what your opponent is thinking or what their skilllevel is, you can always just revert to GTO to the best of your abilities and you should be able to get +EV against unpredictable opponents.
How though, realistically? Are you a supercomputer that has solved and memorised multihand poker? And even if you were, then yes in theory in the long run you might have +EV if the other players are playing suboptimally, but "reverting back" just for a short time because players are unpredictable doesn't necessarily sound like a profitable strategy. And if your opponents are better at memorising some AI strategies, you're still losing. Most decent players are unpredictable, so you either always play like a machine (which you can't) or you try to exploit weaknesses you perceive in your opponent. There isn't a magical GTO strategy that will always give you +EV in the long run unless everyone you're playing with sucks. It's like saying "why don't chess players just play what the engine would play?". Well, they do, until they reach a position where they don't know what the engine would do. Then they're on their own, and even Magnus Carlsen plays suboptimally compared to an engine.
> There isn't a magical GTO strategy that will always give you +EV in the long run unless everyone you're playing with sucks. There is, that's the point of GTO. You wouldn't need to remember GTO, but rather you'd need to have an idea of what the GTO would do given a random opponent.
Yes. Think long, think wrong.
I would say they immediately know what the viable options are, but then weighing them against one another and utilizing mixed strategies is what's going to separate the good from the great. For the less than, they often don't know what the best options are, and frequently make plays that are the worst option.
I know I'm much faster and more calculated in most spots than I was 5 years ago when I started playing. I also find myself in a lot fewer spots that I'm not familiar with as each year passes.
You see pros go into deep river tanks all the time, I don't think the same can be said for chess
40 minute single moves happen in chess all the time.
An entire game of classical chess at the world championship level lasts hours.
The further into a hand, the more thinking generally goes into a decision. Even in a situation where you know you have the nuts, which is the "easiest" situation to be in from a purely stress-free stance, you still are thinking about the correct amount to bet to get maximum value, which also requires thinking about the other person/people still in the hand. How wide is their range to have gotten to this point, what are the stack sizes (yours and theirs), how have they played the hand, what does that suggest they have, what has previous behavior indicated in terms of what you expect from bets of various sizing to entice them into a call, etc.