Intuition

Hand 1: A player calls a raise out of position with seven-deuce offsuit. He flops a full house and cracks his opponent's aces, winning his whole stack. After the hand he says, "You gotta play when you're feeling it."

Hand 2: The player bets twice the pot on the river. After a long think, his opponent folds. "I knew he didn't have it," he says.

Was either of these plays justified? Both? Neither?

Since most situations in poker cannot be analyzed conclusively, it is both necessary and important to make some decisions intuitively. Equally important is knowing when intuition is valuable and when it is not.

My answer would be that the play in Hand 1 was unequivocally bad, while the play in the second hand may (or may not) have been justified. As usual, thinking in terms of ranges of hands clarifies the issue. 7-2 is the worst hand in poker, so when you call with it, what you're really saying is that you would call with any two cards. It's very, very rare for the game conditions to indicate a call with any two. As far as "feeling" that you would hit the flop, unless you're cheating, you don't have access to any information about what the next card will be, so it's hard to see how you could feel it.

Hand 2 is less clear. While you don't have any information about what the next card will be, you have a lot of information about what your opponent might do when you bet: his previous actions in this hand; how he's played past hands in this session; age, attire, posture...and much more. Any piece of information might be the key to the puzzle, or it might not be. This is where experience becomes incredibly valuable. Without experience, you won't pick up on most of the clues, or know how to interpret those you do see. But if you have a lot of experience, you may be able to synthesize all the information available to you to come to a better decision.

Hand 1 and Hand 2 are completely different situations, but people seem to confuse the two. When someone is able to make a good intuitive decision in a situation like Hand 2, all they see is the result, not the previous work that went into it. They conclude that analysis is unnecessary or even counterproductive, that the way to make good decisions is with your "gut." But intuition isn't a replacement for hard analytical work, it's a reward for having done a lot of it.