You may have seen the "sick" AQ on K9QQA vs AA fold from this years PCA.

We got into a discussion about gto/exploitative play and how some people are never bluffing here and it brought up a question in my mind.

Lets say we have a player who never bluffs this river and only has AA or KK, if playing gto is unexploitable, but all of our-bluff catchers lose to value bets (AQ being our absolute-best bluff catcher here), then are we not always -ev when we call here? Wouldn't this mean that gto is being exploited? I know that last question is ridiculous and I'm 100% overlooking something, could anyone point out to me what it is?

If someone has no bluffs, you should never call with a bluffcatcher, even if that "bluffcatcher" is as strong as a boat.
It's in spots like that where a pseudo GTO bot would get owned by an unbalanced player. i.e. A GTO bot might bluff without any fold equity, or it will call with bluffcatchers at some frequency and always lose when it does so.
It's not that "GTO" gets exploited. It's more that is not guaranteed to profit in the vacuum of one hand vs an unbalanced opponent.

The same principle applies in microstakes, where we're advised not to bluff the calling stations and not to pay off the nits that never bluff. If your opponent is exploitable, then you make more money by exploiting him/her; not by trying to play "GTO".

A GTO strategy makes up the money that it loses to someone with no bluffs when his weaker bluff-catchers get to win a free showdown. GTO can be -EV against an unbalanced opponent for a subtree of the game, but is guaranteed to make up at least as much EV in other subtrees.

thanks for the replies

this is the answer I was looking for. What do you mean by "weaker bluff-catchers get to win a free showdown". Wouldn't it be that villain would x/f too much equity when we bet the river? Sorry could elaborate on this and give an example of this using the K9QQA board so I can better understand?

I think he meant if that player is only going to show up with AA and KK here you get to see show down a lot and realize all of their equity.

If the opponent plays well up to the river, they will hold many more hands than just monsters. It’s these other hands that lose to AQ that make up the loss incurred by calling bluffcatchers. However, vs players that don’t bet draws on the turn nor thinner value hands, there is no recouped value on the river; it’s all gained on the turn.

i have not seen the hand, so i can only speculate about how this hand went, but let's make a simplified example of villain being ip, you only reach there with one combo of AQ and A5 and he has KT and AA and there is a potsize bet behind, completely ignoring blocking effects just to simplify the example. if i understand you correctly your thesis was that if villain never bluffs, we call anyways, then he is exploiting us because we are making a -EV call right? well, you have to look at the overall EVs.

you might be thinking that you loose EV because you are focussing on the individual hand. true, AQ was supposed to get value from KT bluffing, and loses all that value because KT checks back. in the balanced play KT would be bluffing 50% of the time, so AQ loses EV equal to 25% of the pot.

but if you consider your range, you are not losing anything because A5 wins it back! A5 would have had to fold if KT had bet, which would have happened also 25% of the time you hold A5, so you win 25% of the pot there.

as you can see, gto is not being exploited, it merely fails to exploit villains gto-deviation. it would be a weird game if gto was exploiteable by someone so nitty only playing the nuts and gto not folding a 2 hole card boat anyways :P

The villain refuses to have his fair share of successful bluffs and we win (otherwise we had to fold them - we cant call with all bluffcatchers).

thanks for the answers everyone

thanks for this I was looking for an example just like this I got it now, great. I knew I was overlooking it just couldn't peg what it was.