Especially combined with his call ott

I thought it was that GTO play could not be beaten in the long run, but exploitative play could win more money against opponents who were themselves playing suboptimally and not adjusting to our exploitation.

I thought so too. And, I think this hand is an example of contrast between the two approaches.

Also, I am not arguing whether, for example, Texas Hold'em is GTO solvable. I'd bet the solution to even 5 max limit hold'em is going to be far more complex and not be realized in my lifetime though, and no limit is too complex to be GTO solved though GT can yield all kinds of insight.

There is no "exploitative vs gto" exploitation is a part of game theory. How can you exploit a deviation if you don't know what your opponent is deviating from?

GTO is part of game theory if you want to get technical. So I guess you could say as a matter of speaking there's GTE, and GTO.

I can get behind that, but you still can't GTE without knowing the GTO.

Yah, I agree, it's bets to have a solid theoretical optimized strategy to then deviate from rather than the other way around, which is unfortunately where I am at right now.

add: I think you'll find computers that are able to tap into only a small percentage of the tree, and still get in the ballpark of what GTO should be if you were to analyze would be with lots of intelligent pruning, but the theoretical complexity of 5 handed limit, I doubt that will be solved in the purely mathematical sense in my life time.

Humans will never be able to play GTO LHE, so its relevancy is questionable.

True

Untrue

I had to leave myself an out by saying questionable.

I think we can learn from it, and possibly apply some concepts, but there's better ways to improve your dollars per hour.

LOL, I died laughing when I read this.



For those of you who don't play professionally: OTR knows what he's talking about.... and he's 100% right

GTO is literally the entire game +1
Exploitative play is overlaid onto GTO baselines to increase winrate + actually know the impacts of the exploits made

Yeah I mean exploitative poker doesn't exist in a vacuum. Like in rock, paper, scissors, I take [1/3, 1/3, 1/3] and you don't beat me. I find out someone is lazy and doesn't throw paper enough ([0.4, 0.2, 0.4]), so I counter by throwing less scissors and more rock.

So maybe we have evidence that someone bet folds the turn way too much, but always calls River if he calls turn. So maybe we exploit this by check raising a ton of weak hands on the turn along w/ our turn value, and bluff river only with the very bottom of our range (like 54 on 963-J-9 to try and fold out 87/QT, etc). But a smart opponent could exploit this by floating a ton with weak hands on the turn and betting when checked to, and also making a lot of light turn bet calls with the intent of snap folding River if We bet (barring improvement)

As of my last post, no. As of today, I might be able to but only for a week this year. It's gonna be a 12 rounder that goes to the judges for a split-decision.

If you make it out, we'll grab a bite at bobby's.

Here's a question I talked about w a student: how do y'all think you make most of your money? Through optimal or exploitative play?

if I had to put numbers on it i would guess I run about
75% optimal, 25% exploitative. extra 10-15% bonus splash on top from body language / verbal interactions which I use to adjust my frequencies by 10% shifts~

No human could ever play even close to GTO tho. Even if we get down to theoretical perfect GTO play, a human player who knows and plays perfect GTO strategy still has the disadvantage of being human and giving off information that gets absolutely destroyed by perfect exploitive play.

So to say that GTO is everything is rather shortsighted.

I didn't say that it is everything. I said it is literally the whole game, which it is.

I miss playing with you bruh <3 Always enjoy your company at the tables. I'll be back @ merce after wsop.

Also the above statement is straight up false.

If you're referencing...
...live reads here: it affects everyone. we all give off tells. doesn't impact the value of GTO at all.
...making mistakes & playing against nemesis: that's being human. human mistakes don't devalue GTO either.
...giving off metagame strategy info about a GTO playstyle: I can literally tell you my entire strategy and be fine. The entire idea behind balanced play is that it doesn't matter what our opponents know. Sometimes people will ask me what I have and i'll just tell them the most common Vbet combo in my range... then I'll remind them about the most common Bluff combo... It doesn't matter at all lol.

The real problem here guys... is that GTO and Exploitative poker are NOT 2 separate things. It's the biggest lol misconception in all of poker. You do not get to choose between the 2 styles.

Exploitative play is definitionally any/all deviations from GTO play. The vast majority of your decisions in poker are "GTO"... especially the simple ones like betting or raising with the nuts.
After identifying mistakes in our opponents, professional players with strong GTO fundamentals are able to exploit extremely well. GTO knowledge begets strong exploitative playstyles.

This is actually an interesting question and comes down to your definitions.

Online it has to be mostly through playing closer to GTO than your opponents for any winner at mid/high stakes.

The online/ex-online pro who shows up in whatever casino to play for a couple weeks at a time in most cases makes most of his money by playing a better, closer to GTO strategy than his opponents. But in many cases he'll play more hands preflop than would be GTO, so essentially all of that additional profit could be attributed to exploitive play even though he might be mostly trying to play GTO postflop against the average opponent.

A long time reg live mid stakes grinder who knows all the players but was never a GTO wizard has way more postflop exploitation in his game. A player like that might actually be a loser if he tried to play the same strategy against everyone, so it could be that 300% of his winrate comes from exploitive play.

And of course, tons of it depends on game quality too. It would be interesting to know how much more an expert player wins than a straight GTO wizard when the 90/70 fish sits in a game. I wouldn't even want to take a guess at that.

Put it this way: I can't play perfectly optimal poker and wouldn't even if I could, but optimal strategies inform most of what I do at the table. Put another way, a game's solution *literally* describes the game itself. Hence, my comment.

Nah, just depends on your definitions. If you built an exploitive robot that reads your eyes, your hands, your breathing pattern, your heartrate, and everything else that's relevant and observable, and you played enough hands against it, it would destroy you for outrageous amounts even if your strategy was 100% GTO.

But if you're talking about playing GTO in a way that no human could reasonably exploit for much, yeah, of course it's possible.


I think everyone whose posts are interesting enough to read understands the difference. You don't give people enough credit.

GTO play is about becoming so fundamentally sound that you can space out and go to your happy place as you relentlessly spam your generic strategy.

Exploitative play is about actually concentrating and doing your best not to kill yourself 12 years and 3 million hands into your LHE career.

This was literally me in 2013. I transitioned from a strong winning exploitative button clicker playing 40/80 live into a GTO robot and only played the exact strategies I modeled for 6months-1yr while I learned. I want to clarify: I am not playing GTO itself (no one can) but a model I created after spending thousands of hours studying it~ I'm able to hit GTO frequncies at game speed very reliably today.

I 100% agree with OTR here. The optimal strategies impact basically everything I do at the table - My entire style is modeled fundamentally around them.

During my GTO robot phase, my winrate was only ~75% of what it was exploitatively. Once I had memorized my GTO approach... I added back in the exploitative deviations but now with an extremely strong understanding of the game~ I also now had the ability to identify exactly where people were off + by how much.

Today, using exploitative play on top of GTO fundamentals:
-) I easily destroy my old winrate against all the fish, and I win WAY more with exploiting than I used to.
-) I easily destroy my old winrate against good players. I don't have to worry about losing vs world class guys. I regularly beat exploitative pros who have leaks in their game as well.
-) I also don't have to worry about inducing counterexploitation by overexploiting myself. When my opponents XC range is too weak.. I can increase my turn bet from 70% to 80% while not going to 100%. Opponent has no idea what's going on, but this has significant impact exploitatively. The strongest exploitative styles are the ones where the opponent has no idea what is going on + we don't fix their mistakes by overexploiting.

GTO wizards are the expert players.

For real guys, "GTO Player" doesn't mean you stop exploiting. They aren't 2 separate things. <3

I have an underwhelmingly low opinion of humanity