You are a random poker player who tries to play well.

Consider you are up against 2 opponents.

1. GTO_bot
2. Exploitative_bot

GTO_bot always plays perfectly balanced GTO strategies. He never adjusts his ranges to your strategy. He doesn't care. He knows he has a winning strategy and sticks to it.

Exploitative_bot knows how to play GTO. But is always looking for exploits. Every single damn spot. He is hyper aware, clairvoyant, can make sick reads and exploit you to death. He is always looking to adjust.

Conjecture : It is easier to play against the GTO_bot than against the Exploitative_bot.

Explanation :

Against GTO_bot, our bluffs have zero EV. So we might as well not make any bluffs. GTO_bot will not exploit us for not having any bluffs. He will still call down at the "right" frequencies. Since our bluffs were 0 EV anyway, we don't lose EV with our range by not bluffing BUT we reduce our variance.

So we can exploit the GTO_bot into letting us have the same EV with our range without the added variance.

Same thing for calling down river bets. We can overfold a lot and the GTO_bot will never exploit us by overbluffing. Since his bets are so perfectly constructed, bluff catching versus him is 0 EV anyway. So we can reduce our variance in many spots and simply give up the pot to him.


Against the Exploitative_bot, we can't do this. If we don't bluff enough, he will exploit us by folding everything. If we don't call enough, he will exploit us by bluffing everything. Against this bot, we are forced to play "good" poker - GTO poker. Against this bot, we can't make mistakes - he exploits us immediately and hurts us much more than the GTO_bot ever could.


So we would rather face a GTO_bot than a highly skilled Exploitative_bot.

Why then are players so concerned about being a GTO_bot rather an Exploitative_bot that knows how to play GTO but is always looking to deviate from it at every opportunity?

This is only true out of position on the river.

Hmmm. I would say you still have to bluff the GTO_Bot otherwise you forfeit too many pots, and bluffing is required to play balanced poker. A highly skilled GTO_Bot will just be less bluffable and harder to beat.

I assume the Exploit_Bot has the same GTO skill but also adds the statistical analysis of your hand history, so of course this bot is even tougher, in theory. However, humans are pretty crafty at exploits and all that is required is to monitor your own hand history and use the info as counter-exploit. Personally I do think that prior history information can be carefully weighed and updated with each hand, and that such a GTO+Exploit_Bot would be more profitable against humans in general, but it would be possible for a human, aided by software, to at least counter this to break even.

I think that players who are interested in playing similar to a GTO_Bot are looking for a safe place to start against random high stakes players that do not have a history. Then, when patterns emerge, the knowledge of the starting point is used to gauge the level of exploit to use against any particular opponent.

In one of Doug Polk’s videos where he talks about how he would beat the best heads-up players in the world, he mentions that he would play the same hands differently from player to player, and sometimes during different sessions against the same player.
He did not get into game theory details, but I think it is fair to assume that these top pros were all pretty well balanced and did not have easily exploited leaks in their play. So, the most likely explanation is the Polk was playing multiple approximations of GTO none of which was perfect, but a slightly less +EV line can confuse a human that is relying on a HUD database.

Yep, humans are crafty exploiters, especially the most skilled and balanced among them.

I think you need to review what GTO is.
You can't beat a clairvoyant.