GTO Poker Simplified: Strategy lessons from the solvers that any cash game or tournament player can apply to their game (The Poker Solved Series)

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The main issue is the following: In live play where 9-handed tables are common, your opponents’ opening ranges and sizes don’t just “deviate” from GTO solutions; they are in a completely different zip code. This is also true to a lesser extent in online 9-max cash games. It has been the experience of our coaches that the rarer 9-max online tables share many similarities with live play, likely because such tables are dominated by live players who sometimes cannot get to the card room. Why did we simplify the mixed solutions? Primarily because getting to grips with even simplified charts is as much as most human beings can handle. Attempting to memorize mixed solutions, if even possible, introduces a massive additional workload with negligible gain in EV. Besides, as we discuss below, the modern art of playing poker involves deviation from pure GTO ranges anyway.

What if Player 1 misjudges Player 2, who starts to counter adjust? Player 2 notices Paper is coming up more often and makes a similar counter adjustment, switching to Scissors half the time and the other two options a quarter of the time each. The new outcome looks like this: How is GTO calculated?" The details are complex but I'm going to steal this post from tombos21 from 2+2 for this: If you don’t know what the game theory optimal strategy looks like, how do you know that you’re exploiting your opponent and not being exploited in return? By gaining a deep understanding of GTO, you can play an unbeatable default strategy and pinpoint your opponent’s mistakes.Is there more than 1 GTO strategy?" Maybe someone else knows the answer but I don't actually know if we can prove it one way or the other in theory. In practice, the answer is yes- you can set a solver to play a flop betsizing of 75% or 33% in many spots and the EV of either one will often be very close to the same, so you are free to study and implement whichever one fits your playstyle more (although it would be good to know both since your opponents may lead you down the other game tree). Dara and Barry’s books always touch on current issues and they were the first to write about ICM and PKO tournaments. By reading them you will be able to not only improve your game but also be informed about the issues being debated and studied by players today.

However, let’s say that your opponent has you covered by going all in and that you need to put in all your chips to call. Would a call give you a positive or a negative expected value?

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GTO only exists in heads up poker, not 6-max." Technically true if you use the definition of GTO as "an unbeatable strategy", it doesn't exist in multiplayer due to collusion. However, Nash Equilibrium does exist, and using that as a baseline is a good starting point. Again, if perfectly replicated it will win at an almost unfathomable bb/100 in any lineup where your opponents aren't all poker experts colluding against you. Of course, in heads up it is literally unbeatable in any way to defeat a GTO player. It was only when I started playing abroad on the European Poker Tour that I came up against players I had no idea how to play against. They were so much better than me. I could not get any reads on them at all or work out how to exploit them. I thought I could not compete, but I remembered the basic precept of game theory was to develop an unexploitable style. It doesn’t matter what they do, if you are unexploitable, they cannot beat you. F = vc / D - vc : Number of Bluff Combos to Bet given a known number of value combos and the optimal value betting frequency