Spend five minutes in the company of a group of poker players and you’re almost guaranteed to hear the word ‘edge’ used once or twice. It’s undoubtedly one of the most common words in today’s poker vernacular since it represents such a broad concept – it simply refers to any situation where one player possesses some kind of advantage over another. Players might refer to a skill edge, mathematical edge, or psychological edge – all concepts which are transferable into many fields outside poker.

One thing that isn’t often talked about, though, is how many assumptions we make when we talk about edges. We make assumptions on a strategic level about a player’s range in a certain spot or how they will react to a certain play or situation. We make assumptions on a mathematical level in a variety of ways. We also make psychological assumptions, although many of these are tied up in our strategic assumptions and the rest usually come from our everyday subconscious habit of profiling and reacting to other people we come across in our lives.

The biggest assumptions of all are usually the ones we make about ourselves. We might assume we have a skill edge over another player – something which is reasonable in many spots and unreasonable in others – or we might assume that we have a skill edge over the field in a given tournament or cash game. We might assume that certain aspects of our personality or playing style give us the psychological advantage in certain situations. But the key to all of this is establishing whether our assumptions about ourselves are actually correct, and herein lies the ‘invisible edge’ in question.

The reason self-awareness is so important in poker is simply because the consequences of lacking self-awareness are significant, much as they are outside of poker. Probably the most obvious example of the need for self-awareness at the poker table is managing our own table image. We spend time thinking about how other players perceive our playing style so that we can better adapt to the adjustments we expect them to make. For example, lacking the self-awareness to realize that our table image is shot to pieces right after we show down a huge three-street bluff could lead to some very unprofitable bluffs in the future.

The concept goes much deeper than that. A large part of creating profitable spots at the table, especially when it comes to playing post-flop, is having an awareness of your own strengths and weaknesses and the kinds of decisions you are likely to be able to make in future. If you’re less comfortable playing post-flop and aren’t good at making big call-downs with weak hands, for example, then it would stand to reason that opening up your big blind defending range against an aggressive player might cost you a lot more money than it would for someone who had a lot of experience playing post-flop out of position.

For this reason, it can be dangerous to try to mimic another player’s style or follow advice that wasn’t given directly to you since a lack of understanding of your own tendencies and abilities could lead you to unwittingly turn a good piece of advice into a weakness in your game. Instead, think carefully about how each piece of poker advice you hear or read might fit within your overall strategy.

If someone says they think 3bet bluffing a lot at deep stacks is a good strategy, but your stats show you’re losing money in deep-stacked 3bet pots, it would be a bad idea to implement this piece of advice until your game were more appropriately equipped.

The same is true when evaluating an opponent at the tables. No specific example is necessary here – it makes sense to play more hands versus players against whom you can reasonably expect to have a skill edge in comparison to those you don’t. An accurate understanding of your own skill level in poker is necessary in order to avoid either playing too many hands against players who are better than you or not playing enough hands against people who are worse.

Identifying the spots where you have an edge helps you to profit from the times you have the advantage and minimizes your losses on the occasions you don’t. Self-awareness – a detailed understanding of your own poker game, the situations you play well and the spots in which you struggle – is crucial to this process. It turns small edges into bigger ones and neutralizes your disadvantages against better players.

Finally, the concept comes into play away from the table too. It’s essential to constructing balanced and productive learning processes and putting together a playing schedule that allows you to maximize your EV and improvement. Setting a schedule where your goal is to play a six-hour MTT session every night for a week isn’t much use if you’re not self-aware enough to recognize that your mental stamina gets severely drained after three hours.

It’s also true of bankroll management and game selection decisions. If your estimation of your poker skill is higher than your actual skill level (something that’s probably true for 80% of poker players), then you’re probably going to end up playing in games where your ROI or win rate is low enough that the variance involved increases significantly. Consequently, if you’re operating at a lower bankroll than you might like, this could greatly increase your chances of going broke.

In short, self-awareness is perhaps even more pivotal in poker than it is in other aspects of life. It’s a crucial element of success in many fields, but since poker is a game where other players are constantly trying to adapt to their perception of you, an inability to accurately perceive yourself can be extremely harmful. It might be an ‘invisible edge’ that’s impossible to quantify, but if it’s not there, you might find out the hard way.