I am a no-limit hold'em player, rcently, I read some poker book, and the most impressive book is bill chen's The mathematic of poker, the GTO, changed my views on poker, but there are some poker toy game to explain GTO, I wanna know:
1.how to use game theory in poker, and which book, or what software can help me to find GTO play at different situation.
2.when other opponent deviate GTO, then how to change my play to exploit them? There are some book to teach this?

Below is my thoughts, it is a little long, but if you have time, I hope you can read this, and give me some ideas, I would very much like to know what I am going to learn next step.

First of all, there is the most basic, and the most important question to me: why I can win others in poker? I always ask this question to myself, maybe someone will have some different answers, but as a beginner, I am thinking that what way I should follow, what poker skill I should learn, let this skill become the most crucial factor to win others.

Unfortunately, I think I don't find a obvious answer, the obvious means..for example, just like running game, I know if I run faster than others, then I will win, so my aim is run faster, I will try to improve this, it is obvious. In poker, I don't find this, I don't find which poker skill I should improve, and which skill I can use to win others. Or I can say, I find a answer, but it is too general, my answer is I will use GTO to play when I don't find other opponents' leak, and if I find that a opponent deviate GTO, then I will use exploit play to gain value. That's my answer, but it is useless for me now even though I knew this. Because I don't know how to operate it, there are some process that I don't know how to handle. I don't know what's the GTO situation in poker, how to expoilt opponent's leak using game theory.(In mathematic of poker, the AKQ toy game, it explain well about value bet and bluff raito, but I need more knowledge about this.)so here is my question: how to use game theory in poker, and which book, or what software can help me to find GTO play at different situation.

And here is my last question, about EO, somebody told me that GTO is a high skill, if you are a beginner, then you can study EO directly, don't need to care about GTO. But my question is if EO means the deviate from GTO, then if I don't know GTO, how could I know that how much opponent deviate from GTO?That means I can't study EO without GTO, right? But If I can study EO directly, tell me how to study it please.

That's all my question, thanks for reading this. 3 weeks ago, when I read the mathematic of poker, I thought that I will find the whole secret about no limit hold'em, but after reading this book, I open the door of poker, then I found that there are a lot of question in front of me. Now, I can only say that I can see the key of poker, but the key is very far away from me now. Hope you can help me, thank you!

Will Tipton's books and videos.

First, forget about learning GTO because it's never been solved except for extreme conditions. Furthermore, if you simply try to approximate GTO, it's will only create more problems for you than solve.

By definition (or logic), any strategy that is not GTO must be exploitable in some way. Therefore any modification to fix exploitable areas in your strategy, but does not achieve GTO will still be exploitable only in different, usually less obvious ways which your opponents are likely to discover before you do.

It seems like there should be an expression that describes this but since I can't recall any I'll just describe attempting to achieve GTO is like: "Not having enough doe to cover the pizza platter." For every hole you patch, you only create more holes elsewhere.

Just the opposite, it's a strategy that requires no skill at all. There would never be any need to adapt or outplay or even observe your opponent. To understand this think of any casino table game that involves using a dealer to play against you. They all must use some GTO strategy that no other strategy can defeat regardless of what's known about the dealers strategy which is quite plain to see.

In fact, since no GTO strategy exists, all winning poker strategies are therefore some form of Exploitative strategy but how Optimal would be based on skill.

But if every strategy is also exploitable as well how can players play a winning game in the long run. How this can be true is with a Ro-Sham-Bo effect where A>B>C>A. This is actually generally the case with the three most common winning styles of:

LAG>TAG>Small Ball>LAG

However the complexities of the game will not make this obvious. Also the advantages can also change as the format of the game changes, e.g. tournament, cash game, short handed play, deep stack play, etc.

If this were the case, how could poker even be worth playing? Could any player ever remain winning in the long run if eventually a strategy can be used to defeat you?

You can actually answer this by answering your own original question which is a great approach to learning poker by the way.

Warning TLDR from here.

You can answer this by understanding that we are all flawed to some degree and poker is a game that measures the relative flaws in our games. As you find mistakes made by opponents, you can adapt an exploitative style that would take advantage of those mistakes.

When starting out as players, those who start out winning first will probably recognize that we are not only flawed, we tend to follow patterns that have been encoded within our subconscious and we call these patterns human nature.

We use human nature as a kind of default to follow when we don't have a clear choice. I have a new theory that the new field of Epigenetics will eventually explain the origin of human nature.

My own simplified understanding is it's a newly discovered mechanism where strong experiences such as famine can cause some chemical changes that can actually change DNA.

I think it follows that by changing DNA in a deterministic manor as opposed to unpredictable or random method. If natural selection were to then preserve the positive changes than it's as if experiences were passed on genetically between generations. I digress.

Since poker is a game of incomplete information, new players will nearly always default to one of these patterns of human nature. Poker players become familiar with human nature at those points where it deviates the most from sound poker strategy. Most typically its a matter of exploiting calling stations but also maniacs, weak passive, name your fish here.

Think about it for a second. Essentially any style that has no proper stopping points is the essence of any fishy play. So human nature may get us started in a generally correct direction but it can't quantify.

So at the bottom of the food chain, poker players see predictable patterns from new players following human nature to exploit. This is level 1 thinking.

All higher levels can be found by asking the same fundamental question. How do I beat other players in my game. It turns out that this is usually by learning a style that best exploits the most successful style used at the level below.

If new players are a universal poker food, at higher levels, where fresh fish may be more scarce, especially if during a poker contraction, we need to look further up the food chain. The next weakest link in the food chain that doesn't include rich players starting out higher, are players taking their first shots at moving up.

Having been there/done that, we understand the thinking at that level and modify our game to exploit that thinking which is basically what leveling is all about.

There are more fascinating mechanisms that also go on it seems like new concepts are still evolving.

It all looks like evolution but if you've been through the last poker cycle, you might recognize it not as evolution but mostly as players adapting to the changing poker economy and once you see it's an economic cycle you may have answers to future games as well as present games.

For instance, if you think something like range merging first came out when AE Jones first coined the term in 2005 with this post:
http://archives1.twoplustwo.com/show...7797&fpart=all

He presents an early stage foggy notion of range merging which is to be expected when exploring a new concept. However it also demonstrates how new the ideas were to the top players of the day, who started in the post boom era. From this post on we chiefly learned about thin value betting but also some lesser aspects of defensive and blocking betting thrown in. Clearly he deserves full credit for it's rediscovery.

You should know that my location hasn't changed since I first joined 2+2 in 2004.

OMG....what a goooood reply, thank you very much!

I read this reply two times, it is amazing...

About GTO, I got it now, and I have new understanding about it.

Thank you all!

I don't know this sentence, can you explain what is the stopping points? Thank you!

Amazing point of view, u should be a writer not a poker player, I believe what u r saying, poker theory changes depends who you are playing with?

Calling stations call because they have no idea of how strong your bets represent your hand or how bad their odds are to hit a draw so they just keep calling.

Maniacs figure I'll just keep betting till they fold with no idea of showdown value.

weak tight play too scared and are easily taken off of a hand that's way too weak imagining worst case scenarios.

Without some kind of training, experience, study. they may make the correct move on one or two streets but then get lost. They just don't know when to slowdown, break, give up.

Thanks, I appreciate your comments, however theory alone cannot usually work out a complex problem without a ton of experience that will either reshape your thinking or abandon it all together.

Once you figure it out and finally organize all your thoughts it will usually seem obvious in hind site but in reality, it was only one of so many different dead ends before finally hitting that epiphany moment. Often times because it's not the easy solution you were hoping to find.

Yes but more specifically when we can see softer targets at the table we don't worry too much about our own exploitable play because players will tend to exploit the easy money first. But at the same time you should be prepared and understand the effective counter strategies you are vulnerable to and the difference from the wrong counter-strategies from lower level thinking and always be ready to adapt, should players start coming after you.

This post is pretty much all fuzzy thinking and most of the solid statements are wrong afaict. Dunno what "extreme conditions" means, really, but if you're referring to toy games, then know that in fact some very large models have been solved computationally. Of course theory done wrong can lead to bad results, but perhaps that means that we should try to do it right rather than giving up altogether.

I guess if an entire equilibrium strategy were written down in charts somewhere, and you referenced it while playing, you could say it took no skill, but in fact any modern attempt to incorporate these ideas into your play will involve a lot of work/skill. Just b/c a dealer has a fixed winning strategy doesn't mean its GTO, and again, this is nothing like case of poker.

You seem to be conflating the technical term "exploitable" (i.e. not equilibrium) with the colloquial "exploitable" (i.e. bad). Later, you confuse another technical term with a specific meaning, incomplete information, w/ some fuzzy colloquial version of your own. Words have meanings.

Also, not that it's important, but your understanding of epigenetics is wrong. See the first couple sentences of the wikipedia article.

Finally, that range merging stuff you link to is pretty much all bs. Do some EV calculations.

OP, I would just think of it this way. Quite often it is unclear what the most +EV play is in a given situation. In situations like that we can instead attempt to minimize our opponents' potential EV. Just because all strategies that you could realistically employ are exploitable doesn't mean that they are equally exploitable or that there is no value in being difficult to exploit.

You don't need to be able to play perfectly in order to benefit from understanding which strategies are closer to perfect than others.

Well that's a lot of area to cover and I need to be somewhere soon so I'll just respond to your first point now and I'm afraid I'll have to follow up on your reply sometime later. I'd love to go over each one with you to help me better understand if there are any holes in my logic. I'll be honest, this is a very big topic that I've had to modify before but it's not as if I'm trying to get it published either. I'm just trying to do what these forums or meant to do, discuss poker and help each other out to better our collective understanding.

Well to be fair this is a large subject to try to boil down into one post and my goal was actually to be as clear as possible despite that fact.

However after re-reading, I see that some of my own biases may have come across as a denial that GTO in poker doesn't exist at all, when it does, which I'll talk about a little later.

Nor was I trying to say that it can never be proven to exist as far as a complete solution or a significant partial solution to poker.

However I've probably made it clear in previous posts as to my doubts on ever finding a GTO solution covering anything approaching a complete game solution for say, 100BB NLH, 6 max for example.

The OP was asking about implementing either GTO or EO into his game.

The point I was making was that GTO has not been solved and therefore there is no GTO strategy to apply to his game.

This next point I do feel rather strongly about.

Many players seem to think that coming up with something that is some approximation of GTO and applying it to their game will be better than just applying good poker strategy for the level of play with the style the player is best suited to handle as has always been done in the past.

This kind of faulty thinking has started to take on a dogmatic quality that is also becoming 2+2 common thinking. This, I know is very bad thinking and in trying to fix leaks that have already been minimized through decades of discussion, and massive amounts of collective experience, only creates much larger leaks on later streets. I've seen it in Poker Snowie, and Ive seen it in other players games who seem to be absolutely convinced otherwise.

Spreading this kind of faulty thinking is not what the 2+2 forums are about or at least not what they used to be about. And when it seems that no one is even attempting to stop this kind of thinking from spreading, well lets just say it starts to seem a bit disingenuous.

By extreme conditions, I meant that it has only been solved for stacks that were maybe four BBs deep and a little deeper if including antes as in the case with tournaments.

I actually think it could also be solved for short stacking strategies in deep stack games, where the differences in relative stack sizes are extreme to a single short stack player. This is largely due to the fact that deep stack players must gear their strategy against the play of other deep stack players as their primary concern. In general this means wider ranges and larger bet sizing pre-flop in order to protect their play on later streets where betting is going to be much more of a concern. I may be willing to post about the mechanics of why this is true at a later date but for now, if you ever watched HSP or any other DSP game, a 5% UTG range with a 2.5BB raise isn't standard. But here is the basic reason why I think a GTO strategy should be easy to find for this scenario.

Imagine a game where all players had 20BBs, i.e. Commerce Casino, but instead of extremely tight play, all players but one were all playing pre-flop as if playing a deep stack game with super wide ranges and larger betting. Then imagine the advantages that the single tight player would have. But in effect, that is exactly what the short stack is experiencing since his is always going to be the effective stack from his point of view. I'd be shocked if a GTO strategy couldn't be found for this player. However this is again, what I would call an extreme condition which should at least be mitigated by casinos by setting higher minimum buy-ins.

I'm glad that we agree on this point.

I think that you'd also agree that the understanding should be that if attempting to find GTO within your game must be applied in live game conditions, be aware that you will always be opening up your game to new and possibly larger leaks until you actually achieve your goal and not that something closer to GTO is better than standard strategies, especially if auto-capping at 100 BBs.

Nice post. Would u mind saying what the large models were(or an example)? and who solved it please, was it you?

I love you for this.

Tipton's books are about concepts, not concrete playing advice. The only book on the market that provides you with something like an ABC-GTO-strategy is Nesmith Ankeny's book on 5-Card-Draw.

http://www.amazon.com/Poker-strategy.../dp/0399506691

Nothing similar exists for Hold'em and most likely it never will, unless you count push-or-fold-systems as a viable shortcut.

+1
(mostly)

I'm sure there are short stack sizes that can GTO a +200 bb DeepStack game as high as 20-25 BBs (possibly even higher with deeper table ), until they double. Vs wider ranges and larger bets, it's basically still push botting value.

Also I'm sure a three handed game can be equilibrium with small variations of these EO strategies.

LAG>TAG>SB>LAG

Edit to add: More sure if LAG had position on SB
Other way there would be too many match ups between LAG vs SB with SB having too much edge.

I've played enough of these where I'd get locked into a style by the other two to be pretty sure about this.

Not all styles may have equal EV and it's also stack dependent though those are not requirements for equilibrium from what I've read.