I hear a lot of people talk about how the games now are more difficult than in 2013 or 2007, and how the game has evolved. I'm curious if anyone who has been around the game for many years can explain a bit about how that has happened.

What I mean is like when did what concepts start to become mainstream and how were these ideas essentially discovered? How has game theory push certain accepted ideas forward or marginalized them? What common concepts now would've been around pre2000?

The main change was that prior to 2003 or so, there was a large percentage of players that were unsophisticated players who played way too speculatively, and decent TAG style with a good understanding of pot odds vs equity could steadily win. Then the game adapted, people started playing aggressively with a wider range, and then players started analyzing the game as an aggregate of hands, versus a single hand (making decisions against a range instead of trying to make decisions against a specific hand).

For example, in tournament play, you are much more apt to see two really good players showdown after three or four streets of action with Ace high versus middle pair than you were ten years ago.

Microsoft put 'a computer on every desk', and software developers with an interest in poker found interesting ways to use them.

I wasn't around back then, but I believe that in the 70s and 80s, most holdem players actually thought JTs was a better hand than AA. There wasn't anything like Pokerstove/Equilab, let alone today's range-crunching solvers, back then. ('SuperSystem' contained an appendix of pre-flop equities that must have blown the minds of some players).
Naturally, as more of the math/theory was computed and understood, it was explained in books and videos and even TV shows (with their holecard cameras and "expert" commentators). There's been an 'explosion' of information, leading to the game getting exponentially tougher.

There is one simple way to explain what's happened... Players are getting closer to GTO.

As the players get closer to GTO, and further from exploitative, there is less potential for profit at their tables.

Nowadays you don't need to know anything about Poker theory to play using GTO. You can just memorise one GTO play after another. So players are applying GTO with almost no understanding of how to exploit weaknesses in their opponents.

When they say the games are getting tougher they don't actually mean that the players are getting better at playing, they are just saying that players are getting closer and closer to GTO which makes it more difficult for everyone to win.

I wasn't around back then either, but I think the stacks tended to be very deep as compared to the normal ~100 big blinds known today and they tended to play very badly, the combination of which helps the value of JTs and hurts the value of AA.

There is not one person in the world who knows the actual GTO strategy for multiple player cash games with 100+ big blind stacks.

And such GTO strategy is likely to be an incredibly complicated mixed strategy, so if someone actually did somehow have it at his disposal, he would be extremely hard pressed to actually memorize it.






The majority of the rest of your quote actually seems correct though. Players are getting closer to GTO and the closer everyone gets, the less profit can possibly be made.

You know what I mean... stop trying to dance around it with semantics.

The closer the players get to GTO the less potential profit there is. Players use programs nowadays to help them memorise plays as close to GTO as possible.

For the record... I remember a few years ago explaining to you guys that GTO would be a heavily mixed strategy n you all went against me as usual. I wonder if I could apply GTO better than that guy by calculating the GTO plays as they come along... Bet I wouldn't be far off.

As to the first sentence, I completely agree with you. As to the second sentence, yea, they try.

I don't recall this at all. I think everyone has known for a quite some time that an actual GTO would be a mixed strategy.

In Janda's book he didn't... That's what we were discussing, the starting ranges he put in his book. Tbf, many of you did say the ranges sucked.

A good few years back there was a huge thread in the high stakes forum (I have a feeling someone like Selbst was commenting in it). If you read it now then you see a lot of "he knows that I know that he knows" kind of talk, from very talented players, and a small discussion where someone brings up the idea of folding so high up in your range. Now, I'd imagine the same hand would have the opposite approach, largely talking about ranges and defence strategies with a token "would he really bluff here?" now and then.

I do wonder if a player like I am now, who plays between 25nl/50nl and the odd 100nl session, went back in time to the start of the poker boom what the world would think of it. When I started getting into the the idea of "proper" poker (a bit after my join date I started taking things seriously) there were a lot of concepts people bandied around that would be laughable now. Things like: never 4-bet bluff, never donk bet, don't flat 3-bets out of position, don't bet for protection.

When I ran the poker society at my uni we got some free merch from Victor Chandler, and there were some books on basic strategy. In the PLO section it explained the dangers of small sets, because set over set is much more common than NLH, but advised trying to "quad up against your opponent's seemingly unbeatable full house". Bad advice is readily available still, but can you imagine opening a book on poker now and seeing that kind of stuff?

And that's without mentioning stuff like limping blind vs blind. What would twoplustwo's take have been on someone trying to advocate that a decade or more ago?


Edit to answer this question a little:

Loosely paraphrasing an Andrew Seidman vid I once watched, when we play poker we construct narratives about our opponents: they're too loose, they fold to 3-bets too much, they bluff too much. This is really easy if you're opponent has a vpip of 89 and 3-bets 40% but at a certain point it becomes absurd without answering "What's the right amount of bluffs? What's the right amount of 3-bets?". And then there's a call for a new approach to the game, the theoretic perspective.

There's also the practical development of the game. When 3-bets are always strong, someone is going to figure out that they can profit hugely by 3-bet bluffing, and so the "never flat OOP" policy has to go. When 4-bets were always the nuts, people started to think "Well why the hell shouldn't I bluff?" and, again, 3-bet/5-bet strategies have to develop further to counter aggressive opponents.

"I think everyone has known for a quite some time that an actual GTO would be a mixed strategy."

People try to simplify it.

The Mathematics of Poker was published in 2006, so the idea that GTO poker involves a mixed strategy has been out there for at least a decade.

Has Yadoula read that book?

Nah, I cracked it by myself

- think about your opponent's range

- think about your range

- think about both ranges

- think about your opponent's range

You can memorize enough lines and use the flop cards of previous hands (or the current hand) to randomize for minimal ~EV until your opponent displays his level of exploitability, which may be massive or slim to none anyway. In the end its still poker among humans.

Short stack heads up NLHE will be solved by bots, and the solution will extend upwards from 25BB as the bots get better. Thus the race will be who's bot is break even at what buy in, etc etc.

I don't even enjoy heads up, and it is the most profit in my database of micro fixed limit.



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