Liv Boeree: about decisions in poker and life

Often, you can hear the following words from poker players: “It’s better to be lucky, not a strong poker player.” This phrase once again emphasizes the importance of luck during poker sessions. Despite this, no professional player will exchange his skill for simple luck.

However, how to assess the level of your skills? How to learn to determine the result based on your abilities? When to rely on skill, and when to trust your intuition? The answers to these questions were prepared by a professional poker player and a member of the team PokerStars Liv Boeree.

Liv Boeree: factors affecting the game of poker

Liv Boeree identified three key factors that are present during the hand: luck, accurate quantitative indicators and intuition.

• Luck.

Speaking about luck, the professional player noted that in some areas a person cannot control absolutely everything. For example, well-being, relationships or health sometimes behave extremely unpredictably. In this row is the game of poker.

“Like poker, life is a game of skill and luck,” Liv added.

As an example, the girl mentioned a major tournament that a poker player wins and thereby further overestimates the factor of his own skill. Sometimes the recognition of luck in a particular situation leads to a more realistic assessment of their abilities.

• Quantitative indicators.

The second thing that Liv focused on was quantitative indicators. According to a professional player, not only in poker, but also in life, the probability of certain events is expressed in concrete numbers and not in abstract phrases like “maybe”, “possibly”, etc.

“Poker is a game of probabilities. It is necessary to think and operate with numbers.”

By doing everything correctly and using specific numbers, you will be able to remove a lot of unnecessary interpretations that arise from thoughtless abstract estimates.

• Intuition.

According to Boeree, methodological analysis, rather than intuition, has recently become a key point in poker.

“Our intuition is not as perfect as we would like to believe,” – says Liv.

The poker player believes that the “sixth sense” does not always suggest the right decisions and is sometimes very vulnerable to self-deception, self-delusion and other biases.

Summing up, Boeree shared the opinion that during the hand (as, indeed, in other areas in which a person has insufficient experience), it is important to listen to intuition. Still, it is necessary to make decisions only after a deep analysis.