jfc GTO isn’t about winning. It’s a defensive strategy to ensure you lose the least against whatever mix of opponents you might face.
That’s why it’s a bad choice against easily exploitable opponents.
If you’re asking me, the timing of my trip was dictated by family circumstances. My preferences for which tournaments to play within that window leaned away from NL. I generally played whatever mixed game tournament $1500 and under that I could find on any given day.
I’m not sure where you found this explanation, but IMO it’s not accurate.
GTO is not and should not be an overall playing style, but rather is a specific strategy to use within individual hands against good, tricky players to avoid being outplayed.
IDK. I never studied any GTO really I don’t think. But this is also from UPswing poker site:
A GTO strategy does not take into account the type of strategy an opponent is employing and thus is not always the most profitable strategy. For instance, a GTO strategy bluffs on the river against a calling station just as often as it bluffs against a nit.
What term should we use to describe the overall strategy of using GTO over many individual hands
(It’s GTO)
The only time an unwavering GTO strategy makes sense is if you are playing at a table filled with crushers, which shouldn’t be a table anyone would want to be at.
Lol
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I mean I don’t necessarily know what I’m talking about but my understanding of GTO is that it’s independent of the tendencies of the particular person you’re playing against. Consider the prisoners dilemma which I think is the original GTO case study. The GTO play is to confess even though that’s the worst outcome if both prisoners do it.
Go back and reference the discussion we had about it a few months ago when you first started riding NBZ’s ass.
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The word “many” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.
Lmao
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This is exactly true.
And nobody here is arguing that you shouldn’t play exploitive poker instead of GTO when you are playing a bunch of fish. This all just came up because it was clear Clovis had no fucking clue what he was talking about when he started sprinkling GTO about in his advice and responses to NBZ a couple of months ago.
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RE: NBZ’s strat: a strategy that involves playing passively and getting into a bunch of multiway pots seems pretty suboptimal to me. It might work in some games or for some players, but trying to get fancy with bluff catching is just another way of saying you’re playing a guessing game. Maybe you’re really good at the guessing game but ultimately it’s usually better to be the one making your opponents play it.
Isoing the fish and just beating them over the head with thin value is bound to be more profitable in the long run. Not saying you go raise pre and bet/bet/bet every hand, obviously you have to take into account how your range and their range interact with the board, player tendencies, etc. Maybe it’s not possible to iso as much in your games; I dunno, but there’s a reason that a bunch of the biggest winners have an aggressive style. People don’t know how to react to it and they make massive, massive mistakes.
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I think he was referencing specifically ring plo with those comments and I can see the merit there
I think it’s best to think of GTO as a baseline strategy that you can deviate from to exploit opponents as you find things to exploit. A true GTO solution is too complex for us to solve for, but understanding the shape of what it looks like allows us to understand what sort of deviations can exploit opponents.
Many good players, maybe even some of the best, understand exploits at a heuristical rather than theoretical level.
I don’t play GTO nor do I play maximally exploitative. I play a style influenced by principles learned from game theory mixed in with some exploits where I understand why they work. I think it allows me to play around the country and not get into too much trouble no matter what kind of game I am in.
My general instinct is to play passively and only act when I know why I am acting. I never learned a mode of button-clicking aggression for the sake of aggression. I never got used to just barreling. I spent more time counter-exploiting over-aggressive players who were running over fish rather than targeting the fish. Maybe that wasn’t the max EV thing to concentrate on, but it was the stuff I could see more clearly in my head, so I felt more confident doing it.
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I think this is a great way of thinking about things, my thought process is similar. I’ve tried to open up the aggression in many games, many spots, I just don’t think people are finding enough folds, so I try to have it a bit more. All relative of course. Ebb and flow.
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When people play too many hands if you let them in cheap and overplay medium-strength hands in multi-way pots, it’s probably incorrect to try and shut them out of the pot preflop. When people bluff too much or have tells that make it obvious they are bluffing, you should given them a chance to bluff.
It’s also kind of hard to iso in a loose full-ring PLO game where no one 3bets without AAxx.
I think people have gotten so used to aggression as a heuristic that they have become incapable of imagining any other way of playing. My understanding of the solver work out there is that the cbetting frequencies advocated a decade ago were much higher than optimal. Yes, they do still exploit certain types of players, but you can get wrecked by a good player who knows counter-exploits.
Anyways, here’s a hand I played wrong last night. The correct play will feel weak-tight to a lot of inexperienced PLO players.
I check T976 in the BB in a six-way limped pot. The flop is 984 with two hearts. I have 96 of hearts in my hand. SB leads out for pot. He generally has a range of sets, top two, and combo draws when he leads out here.
Top pair, a wrap, and a flush draw looks pretty, but this should be a fold in PLO. Against this particular player, I can call in position if not too many players are in because he has some tells which will let me know where I stand on the turn, but my position, both relative and absolute, is pretty bad in this hand. With so many players behind me and the possibility of my draws being dominated, I should fold, but I lol called.
I had a couple of callers behind me. SB potted it on a queen turn and I insta-mucked. It was a $30 mistake that I usually avoid. I make money because everyone else at the table makes that mistake repeatedly and I usually don’t. The really bad players will sometimes even raise in my spot.
Have you read The Mathematics of Poker by Chen and Ankenman?
- Yes
- Tried but couldn’t finish
- No
- Never heard of it
- LOL books
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For sure. As pointed out earlier I think definitions are messing us up.
As I understand pure game theory, e.g. the famous prisoners tournament, tit for tat (this winning strategy normally) doesn’t go for equilibrium. It wins.
I agree this is an imperfect analogy on poker. Because nobody can be gto exploration is used.
I am still confused though if a true gto strategy would not win but be equilibrium?