Before I learned about gto preflop (3/4/5 betting) I had no idea what I was doing and just 3betting like a headless chicken whenever IP and always OOP.. never flat called etc and always fold to 4bets unless I had KK+.. Maybe QQ+, AK if it's btn vs blinds.

Now I am much better at it when I know what GTO is but it's a loooot of ranges you have to memorize depending on what position you are playing against and what their open% is.. too much to remember.

And I read that it's a lot of players that don't like GTO so I'm just wondering how you do it without GTO?

3betting is the easiest part but can still be a bit hard.. 3bet J7s against CO from BTN for example.. or is this good enough hand to call?

And if he starts 4betting you and you folded first 3 times, what kind of range do you think he is doing it with and what kind of range would you start shoving with? I would have no idea how to know all this if I didnt have all these preplanned gto strategies where I can quickly check what to do if my opponent is for example 4betting JJ+,AQ+. But there's still the question about how do you know what he is 4betting.. You see his open range in cuttoff for example 28%.. And he has just started to 4bet you every now and then after folding to first few couple of 3bets.. maybe he is just getting good hands so you keep folding a few more 4bets.. but then you start wondering how wide his 4bets are but what do you do without gto? Then 6th time he 5bets you and this time you have Q9s.. fold again? probably, then a while later youg et 4bet for the 7th time and you have A9s.. are you going to shove this hand because he is 4betting so much? He has got to be bluffing. With GTO strategies I have created I can easily handle all these situations.. But without them I would be back to being a headless chicken with no idea what to do.

Maybe you are using gto without that you know it?
Or how do you know what to do?

No one knows what a preflop GTO solution is (except maybe for cases where you are folding or shoving), so I'm not sure what you're talking about.

Suboptimally.

Not necessarily true even against a GTO opponent.

Actually, it's pretty much right there in the phrase "game-theoretical optimum".

(Perhaps you're confusing GTO with Nash equilibrium, which is a starting point for GTO, but far from the entire thing. GTO against a non-Nash opponent is usually going to be non-Nash.)

What I mean by GTO is the GTO videos that matthew janda has made about preflop. Sure, it might not be 100% GTO and we can't prove it's GTO but it's about as close as we can get to it for now/ever.

I'm in good company though:

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/15...ology-1180391/

I think OP meant also Nash = GTO.

What the dude with the (madprops) Fats Waller reference sn is saying is that when you're playing a fish you want to use an optimal response approach. In fact you want to use an optimal response approach all the time because no one currently knows any Nash Equilibrium for NLHE (unless some chinese *** hole comp scientist has a particular poker fetish). So as far as "GTO" preflop what you want to do if you're concerned with the best action vs an unknown is try to compose a model opponent from all population tendencies and choose your optimal action vs that composite opponent. After that if you wanted to be optimal about it you would want to use some form of valid statistical reasoning to depart from that neutral approach as more player specific information became available. The UoA people et al have many papers on the subject which can be found here by searching phrases like "Sonia" and "LHE bot", "counterfactual regret minimization" etc, I'm too lazy to search for them.

In practice none of this matters unless you're playing the absolute stupidest nosebleed stakes where players actually apply this stuff at game speed. Vs fish you should concentrate purely on optimal response and that can be done quite effectively with commercially available tools and some serious time investment.

Says who? Matthew Janda?

yea, imo, read this (whole) thread, StM

I've probably said "this is my best guess as to how to try to play GTO in this spot" but I've definitely never said I know GTO pre-flop ranges (I've said the opposite many times).

I do tend to show my "best guess" ranges pretty often but I'm always aware they're far from perfect with no one actually knowing the GTO ranges. Hopefully that's pretty clear to everyone.

I've never seen your videos or read much that you've written. What's your justification for believing that your guess is related to GTO in any way? I'm not saying you're wrong, but basically, how are you measuring or quantifying your claim?

It's pretty easy to prove something "must" be wrong, but pretty much impossible to prove something must be correct (given a few assumptions and in most spots). So I mostly just try to make ranges where I don't see anything that has to be wrong given the other assumptions we believe.

So for example, if we don't believe the button should be able to profitably open any two cards in 6-max, then we know the blinds need to defend at a certain combined frequency given the opening sizing. And if we're being realistic, we can probably also conclude they must 3-bet at certain frequencies or else the button will get to see a flop in position for an incredibly cheap price.

Too often, the terms GTO and Nash get abused by many authors on poker. Call it hyperbole if you want.

OTOH, it is not so simple to determine how to exploit these pseudo-GTO strategies. It may well be the case of too-difficult-to-exploit being indistinguishable from the impossible-to-exploit property of a true GTO strategy. If that is indeed the case, then from the practical POV, what the true GTO strategy actually is becomes irrelevant for practical play. I would expect there to exist a range of practical strategies for which this property probably holds.

Everyone consciously or unconsciously utilizes some type a baseline model of what they deem to be correct play. Such models tend to be incomplete with a lot sections of the I-can't-figure-it-out-yet variety, which describes me quite well. These pseudo-GTO strategies can be useful in filling in at least some of these "pot holes." It's better than nothing I would expect.

These players that incorporate one of these pseudo-GTO strategies are merely trying to be a bit more systematic and rational about determining their baseline model. How well they have succeeded in doing this I haven't worked out yet. Until then, I can't really be too critical of them. And even then, it may well be too much trouble for too small a payoff.

This is very dangerous thinking. I often see good players lose tons of money because they're assuming an opponent is playing optimally.

How do you play poker without overthinking it? Recognize your opponents aren't pieces of software which cannot change from pre-set behaviors and responses. Your opponent invariably will make mistakes and make plays that not only deviate from game-theory optimal, but common sense optimal. If you do not expect them to then you yourself are making a huge mistake and you're going to be quickly exploited and taken to value town by every villain you face who catches on to the fact that you think every line he takes is an optimal one.

You're asking how do I transfer from an almost aspergers-level all math approach to one which by it's own definition relies on intuition, reading, and weird gut feelings which experience proves to be correct but you're framing the question in a way that suggests you expect a mathematical answer or analysis in response. Some of the best poker players don't need to know a lick of any of the real complicated odds, because they can sit down with players who basically wear their hole cards on their face to them.

Overthinking in poker can be a big time leak. This is how you end up getting crushed on level nine but a level two player who just had a dead read on you from pre-flop on.

This doesn't quite make sense though.

If a good player makes a play that is profitable in the long run assuming that their opponent is playing optimally, then if it turns out that their opponent is actually not playing optimally, then this can only make the good player even more money with some unexpected profit added in.

It's a bit like some people thinking that you have to adapt your online game to live poker. You don't at all. If you are playing a brilliant GTO style that works online, then you will be printing even more money in the long run with the exact same strategy against the live unbalanced donks.

its not gto to ignore tells.

but here the snake bites in his own tail, because gto always does the same(or different things with the same %ages).

For me a player who does something which is truly against common sense, maybe always making a huge timing tell if he has aces and then 3bshoves, but does the same thing without the timing with every other hand, i would in fact be a donk do call him with anything other then AA if he times.
It doesnt mean "gto" without tells cant print money, it just means that gto WITH reads will just completly destroy any average player out there.
And just be honest, we all have our little tells, which in live play are observable over a long period of time.

Like: we sit there in a 100$ live donkfest and push/fold nash, but in close spots, like 87s on the button we look at a chart.
if we look at the chart we just gave information away and even tho we play nash, we arent playing gto(which in my view is playing unreadable AND mathematicly correct )

Even your eyes can be a tell, so dont think just because you can crush nl200 online you can rape guys who play 50 years live

If you have a chart that you need to look at from time to time, you look at it every time you make a decision. Tell gone.

Lol, online poker is harder, so if you can beat $200NL online, the same strategy against worse opponents will work live.

Hardly anyone steals when playing live, so you get to see more free flops as the BB, and when you steal a tonne, loads of donks flat loads of hands OOP without the initiative against you. You're basically printing $$$ in these situations, just like you would online because it's the same game with the same rules.

Tonnes of players limp in when playing live. This is -EV if a good reg raises them from behind, unless their hand is JJ+ and AK.