How winning players actually think about poker, according to Doug Polk

Doug Polk is Pumping Out YouTube Videos

Doug “WCGRider” Polk has been on the grind in terms of YouTube videos lately.

He appeared on Joe Ingram’s Poker Life podcast in June earlier this year. There, the two major poker video creators made a prop bet: the two have to put out a combined 120 videos over the span of the next four months, otherwise they have to go sky diving.

Polk has shifted his career focus to almost exclusively making content online. He’s not playing poker anymore and he’s not planning on returning either – he told Ingram in the same podcast that he no longer enjoys playing the game.

Since the prop bet was made, Polk has been doing the lion’s share of the work. While “Chicago Joey” only put out 3 videos, Polk has been posting a new video every day for the past month.

They’re mainly analysis of poker hands or commentary on news from the poker world. However, one of his recent videos was something different.

Doug Polk Shares Words of Wisdom

Polk put out a 15-minute video providing a fascinating insight into the minds of professional poker players, especially his.

He broke down his own thought process when he’s playing a hand as precisely as one could:

“When I get dealt my hand, I would look at each player as they act. When it gets to me I would visualize what is my range going to be here. I’m already going to have a pretty good idea based on the action. If it’s folded to me, I know my open frequency. (…) And I’m thinking about that range before I see my hole cards. That way I’m not biased by what my hole cards might tell me.”

He really emphasized the point that professional poker is essentially making decisions over and over again, using the exact same thought process. He even went on to claim that because of that, some of the most successful players “aren’t the sharpest tools in the shed”, they just got that one method down to a T.

Doug Polk also weighed in one of poker’s most debated question: which is a better strategy, completely GTO-based or exploitative?

“If we start with an exploitative approach of what my opponent did once we can justify basically anything, right?

Okay, let’s say that I open the cutoff and my opponent 3-bets the button and I saw him 3-bet Jack-3 off-suit once, so I 4-bet. What do you have? Oh, it doesn’t matter because he has Jack-3 off-suit.

No, this isn’t how you think about strategy on a high level. We try to perform a balanced, mixed strategy and focus on trying to perfect our own ranges and make adjustments around the edge” – said Polk.

You can watch Doug Polk’s “video essay” in its entirety below.

If you wish to read about his beef with Charlie Carrel which is likely to result in a defamation lawsuit, click here.

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Filed Under: Poker Gossip Poker Strategy Poker News

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