I have heard a few things about GTO and I am very interested, but naturally, I don't have money to spend on solvers. I wonder if there is a way to study basic GTO for free.

Unless you do it for fun, there's not a big incentive for you to learn gto until you've already made enough money in poker that you can get your hands on GTO+

Aner0 will caution beginners against GTO because it's very easy to misapply/misunderstand solver concepts, but IMO that intellectual curiosity is invaluable in the long run. Even if it's misapplied at first


You can view preflop solutions for free and one postflop spot per day on GTO Wizard without a subscription. This is a library of premade solutions, and probably the easiest way to "dip your toes" into GTO solutions.

You can also try solving your own stuff, although this is easier to mess up as you're responsible for all of the inputs. Most solvers (e.g. GTO+, Piosolver, Simple, etc) include some free flop you can solve to test it out. Some even allow unlimited turn/river solutions. There are plenty of ways to explore GTO concepts for free.

There are plenty of good poker theory books, videos, and courses out there to learn fundamentals.

Good luck!

Let's say the closest casino to where you live is only 20 minutes aways vs. 90 minutes for the other 3 casinos. However the local casino usually has 1 tight 2/5 game. Players are playing fairly snug, don't get out of line & most money is won when one person gets coolered. There are only 2 players who will test you during the day & occasionally some gamble it up at night. However, for the most part, everyone is trying to be the next great Garrett Adelstein void of "big plays" & just excellent reads.

This is where GTO makes the game profitable, no? Piosolver best for this?

Let's say the closest casino to where you live is only 20 minutes aways vs. 90 minutes for the other 3 casinos. However the local casino usually has 1 tight 2/5 game. Players are playing fairly snug, don't get out of line & most money is won when one person gets coolered. There are only 2 players who will test you during the day & occasionally some gamble it up at night. However, for the most part, everyone is trying to be the next great Garrett Adelstein void of "big plays" & just excellent reads.

This is where GTO makes the game profitable, no? Piosolver best for this?

There's a free solver here, which is the one I'm using at the moment. I don't know how it compares to commercial solvers. It's probably worse, but it's the best free option we have right now.

Design toy games which are feasible to mathematically solve by hand. It will make it easier to understand and effectively use solvers when you do decide to buy one.

Yes! I recommend the Finding Equilibrium youtube channel, especially the "Ariel Chronicles" series where a brand new player learns to apply some GTO strategies and you see the winrate improve. Each video covers one topic such as flop defense, slow-playing, block betting, etc... A lot of the channel is very complex and hard to follow but this series is made for a GTO novice

GTO would tell you to stop playing in an awful game and go to another casino

So.... Mathew Janda's book on playing in tough games is a waste of money? Just go to another casino?

thanks for recommendation

You can find The Mathematics of Poker PDF and look at the toy games. It's a book from 2006 but people still read it. Skimming through the rest didn't help me too much.

You can study GTO for free in the GTOBase, now it includes more than 10,000,000 of free GTO Solutions for MTT, 6-Max Cash and HU Cash.

This resource also has a mobile app for iOS and Android.

it sounds like you have a decent read on the game and the population tendencies of the local players. if you're smart enough to have this down, creating an exploit strategy to go into this game and exploit the local players could be your way to printing.