In general, most of us spend the majority of our time playing and over time, because we hear it again and again, we accept some statements about the game as fact. For example:

"It's better to play in position than out of position."

Because most of our sources of learning about poker are extrinsic (books, videos, forums), most people don't have a good idea (or desire) to approach learning from an internal perspective. Most people also don't have big enough sample sizes of hands to find significant patterns in their play. Thus they accept generalities and many treat them like gospel. Their poker foundation is thus not very stable and they continue to make mistakes. Some are bigger than others of course, but leaks are leaks.

Now - the extrinsic sources are absolutely key to learning. If I didn't believe that, I wouldn't be involved with CardRunners :) The problem is that people misapply and overgeneralize things they see and read. Part of the reason for this is that they don't critically question the information given and really wonder why, why why. In their defense, it's difficult to ask the really penetrating and important questions if your own depth of knowledge isn't that deep. This is all relative of course and we are all on a spectrum. We have the losing 5NL player on one end and Haseeb on the other. We are all somewhere in between. The key is to continue developing a deeper understanding and moving along that spectrum.

Over the last week or so, I have done nothing but analyze my database while thinking and writing about poker. It's been a fairly intoxicating experience because it forces me to really question and rethink some ideas that I always thought to be true in light of the empirical evidence that I see from applying different HEM filters.

The sample size is significant, and even with some obscure filters, I feel like I'm getting pretty good data. Here is one observation which at first surprised me but then as I was forced to think deeply about it, made sense.

Aces show a higher winrate when played OOP. I think I have some clues to why that's the case, but I I am curious as to what you think.

Edit: This is filtered for single-raised pots (so no 3-bets involved).