I was making fun

Knowing you'll get paid off if you hit a gutshot can be a reason to make a call, but it's still a mathematical decision because you need to figure out if your pot odds + implied odds are greater than your odds of hitting.

Certainly you're using feel (I guess) to determine that he has a strong hand and will pay you off if you hit, but you still need to do math to figure out if the call will be profitable.

Why dont I play live in casinos since the games are softer? The closest one is an hour and 20 mins from me. I do go there now and then, but obv Im not going every day.

Playing at Stars probably will make you better faster than playing at Cake, but Ive already been through that whole route. Ive played the tougher competition. I got better and moved up. I got to 5/10 and played quite a bit there. I played some 10/ 20 and even a bit of 25 / 50, but I knew quickly that I wasnt the next Phil Ivey.

I dont have the stomach for those games. I dont aspire to make millions of dollars playing poker. Sure it would be great, but its not gonna happen. I can however make close to $100K per year with RB playing part time 1/2 and some 2/4 at Cake without busting my ass.

I made more money last year playing poker than Xaston did (according to what he posted). Am I better than him? I doubt it, but Im obviously doing something right.

Add to that my real salary at work and I have much more money than I need. I dont have champagne tastes. Why play the toughest sites?

The more I think about this, the more it seems just like a matter of degrees.

Player A says "thats a big pot and I have a flush draw. I seem to have odds, so I call"

Player B says "I'm getting 3:1 on a 4:1 draw, but I have implied odds so I call"

Players C says "I'm getting 3:1 on my 4:1 draw, but his range isnt weighted strongly enough to strong hands, so i fold"

Player D says "I cant call based on odds, and I dont think he has a strong enough hand to pay me if i get there, but that means he really cant call a shove most of the time. I shove"

Player E says "His calling range is only 10% of his current range and I have 25% equity against it. A shove is profitable"

Player F says "He knows that this is a scary board I can bluff, so him having bet means I need to adjust his range to maybe 30% strong hands that will call. A shove is not profitable"

Player G says "A shove is marginal, but i need to balance my ranges. Making a slightly -ev semibluff here 10% of the time makes me much harder to read"
and so on and so forth

My point I guess is that as you progress in levels of your thinking, you can make either a qualitative or a quantitative decision. While the quantitative method will almost always be more accurate, it is highly sensitive to what you plug into it. You can make big mistakes using math if your assessment of his ranges and your own perceived range are off. Ice seems to arguing that if you have good instincts and are usually accurate in what you put other guy on, you can get by with ballpark math, while the opposite isnt as true. From my limited NL play, I suspect he's right. fwiw i think the opposite is true of LHE.

Well, I've only made it to page 3 here, but feel like I should say something...

I agree with you to a large extent. Except for some basics like pot odds, reading your opponent is more important than math (without some basics, I have my doubts that you can get by, although it is possible just to memorize certain situations that you like/are willing to stack off, but I know you don't do that). Obviously, if the specific betting sequence shows you to be ahead, then there's no problem with calling however large a bet or pushing.

At least with some of the more game-theoretical stuff I've been doing lately, really on almost every street it presuppposes that you can put your opponent on some range. So, again, if you're not fairly good at interpreting that range, then you're not going to get very far. But I think understanding that stuff gives you a definite edge over some quite good players (most of whom don't understand that kind of thing) as well as increasing your edge over bad ones.

In all honesty, though, I think it's really about having fun while at the same time playing a winning strategy. It's fun for me figuring out these precise betting, raising, re-raising ranges in various situations, and it's obviously not fun for many others. And I should add that the game-theory I've been doing doesn't presuppose anything more than algebra. You can also do most of them with calculus (maximization problem), but it's usually more complicated and unnecessary. It's really not higher math that's involved here--just takes a little getting used to to learn to set up the equations. But that's a completely different subject.

Anyhow, I think understanding the math can increase whatever edge you have, but you can clearly get a very long way without an excessive amount of it. I doubt that Doyle Brunson has delved very deeply into game theory (although I could be wrong there), but I know Chris Ferguson has and would expect that players like Negreanu or Barry Greenstein have as well.