Making good poker decisions

I was thinking recently about what goes through people's heads when they are making decisons in a hand of poker.  The amount of variables you can analyse is huge, starting from the very basic 'what is my hand?' to the more complex 'he knows I know he knows my turn range is very polorised in this spot'.  I recently read two very good examples of extremely thorough hand analyses by two excellent players:

Hand Analysis by Sauce

Hand Analysis by Phil Galfond

These examples give you an idea of just how deep your thinking can go when trying to make decisions in hands.  They include things like player history, game dynamics, psychology and HUD statistics.

However, just how much of what these guys write in these entries actually consciously goes through their heads at the time is up for debate.  Unless these players have brains that function at a massively higher rate than my own (possible I suppose, I'm not that smart) then they can't consciously think of all those variables in the 30 or so seconds you would have to make decisions.  Therefore they are either pretending they thought these things (unlikely, though we all like to embellish from time to time) or much of what they analyse occurs in the subconcious.  I believe the second factor is more likely.

It is my belief that the best poker players in the world are the ones that are able to process the most information in the subconscious when making decisions.  I have found a lot of people, like those on 2+2, can analyse a hand perfectly on a forum and come up with very logical arguments for why they would do certain things but their actual long-term results suck.  I think such people lack the subconscious set of skills.  In poker, particularly on the internet, we do not have the time to consciously process lots of information.  Also, consious poker thought is very mentally exhausting if done over long periods of time.

I think this is why I feel so much more knackered after a live poker session compared to an online one, despite the online one requiring much more actual decisions to be made.  Internet poker is what I have done for a long time now and what I know best.  Therefore it is a skill where I can make decisions most of the time without really thinking about them.  Whereas I am much less used to the live arena. It often brings into play variables I have never encountered before and therefore causes me to consciously think about more things all the time.  Being able to shift a lot of your decisions to the subconscious in online poker is actually a very necessary skill if you are playing multiple tables.  Using a lot of conscious thought on one decision can easily be at the detriment of another decision on another table which could lose you money overall.

This is why you will often see typically internet based players taking a long time to make decisions in live games.  There is no merit to making quick decisions if it means you are not analysing all the available information properly.  The only reason could be if you were slowing the game down too much and therefore making it worse.

The difficulty is that it's very difficult to train yourself to be very good at the subconscious level of thinking.  The best people are probably just the ones that are naturally the most intelligent.  I imagine just playing lots and lots of poker is the best way of advancing this skill set.

Big new tune from M.I.A and cool video.