Quote:
Originally Posted by 4-Star General
Hi, I'm not a strong GT guy so I'm gonna ask a few (dumb) questions.
- Since today's games won't run if the at least a fish is sit, why players keep focusing on the GTO holy grail? I mean let's say we have found a complete solution for the entire game... This solution is unbeatable but this doesn't mean it is more +EV than an exploitable strategy against the fish...
- How do you actually apply the GTO strategies in real time? So you have found a solution and you want to apply it in your game, seems pretty dauting to me, what I'm missing?
- What are your thoughts for multiway pots? If I recall right, I watched one of your vid on CR and you state that if 2 players are playing GTO in a MW pot vs an unbalanced opponent, they ended up losing... is that right? So we can just blow up the entire GTO work letting the pot be MW?
Ty in advace and best of luck with your project
1) I think the biggest reason to focus on GTO strategies when in real life you are always going to be playing against imperfect opponents (whether they are a fish or the best reg they will still be pretty far from a perfect GTO player) is actually pretty simple when you think about it. How do you know a strategy is exploitable and how to exploit it if you don't know what GTO is? As a simple example, in my Flop C-bet defense strategy pack here:
http://gtorangebuilder.com/#gto-dojo I show that on many common flops optimal fold to c-bet vs a 2/3rds pot c-bet is about 50%.
A few years ago people were generally applying 1-alpha frequencies to assume that an optimal fold to c-bet on all boards was 40%. Imagine you thought the correct frequency to fold was 40% and you run into an opponent who folds 48%. You might try to exploit them by c-betting far more than usual and picking up the "free money" from the fact that they fold to much when in reality they actually fold to little. Doing this would actually end up losing substantially, you'd be exploiting yourself! And you'd never really even know or understand why what you were doing wasn't working. My guess is that if you look around you can find threads on 2p2 where people in the past have justified c-betting a ton of air because "their opponent folds to c-bets to much" when they actually fold near optimal.
Understanding what GTO play looks like is the only baseline you can use to determine what parts of your opponents strategy are even exploitable and how to exploit them. If you don't know if they are betting or folding to much / too little how would you ever adopt an exploitative strategy to counter them?
To take this a bit farther, GTO calculations can also be used to compute minimally exploitative strategies that will show you exactly how to exploit a specific leak in your opponents strategy and they can tell you how to measure how big an EV gain you can get by attacking that specific leak. I have a free youtube video on that here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xfMmaWO42o8
2) I would never suggest that anyone just mimic / copy the output of a GTORB solution and try and play exactly that way at the table. Instead you should learn to understand why GTORB mixes when it does, why concepts like runout coverage / blocker effects / etc are important and how they effect EV, why in certain spots in 3-bet pots you should c/rai medium strength hands on the turn, etc and apply those concepts to your game while at the same time using your knowledge of GTO to understand which parts of your opponents play is weak and how it can be attacked without opening you up to too much counter exploitation.
3) GTORB won't even calculate GTO play in multiway pots. If you reach a spot in the hand where you are down to two players you can apply GTO theory from the pot where the 3rd player folds onwards but I wouldn't recommend trying to play GTO at any point while there are still 3+ players in the hand.
Hope this helps,
swc