OK, we have a thread on what GTO is and isn't. Let's not argue it here.

It should be pretty intuitive that as 3bet and 4bet frequencies increase (and therefore used as a proxy for how “tough” your game is) the size of your opens need to decrease.

If there is a limper then you can't be opening.

Clearly, if your opponents are awful and will call 10BB raises with 94o, you want to play a strong linear range and value bet them to death. In my experience at $1/$2 (I have played about 200 hours over the last year for research purposes), most players do not call 10BB raises with 94o. They instead only call with "decent" hands.

If you instead make a pot-sized raise or perhaps a touch larger, they will call with all sorts of junk, giving you a large amount of preflop equity. You will lose the pot more often as more people see the flop, but that is fine because you have a substantial amount of equity and your opponents will often play poorly after the flop.

One play that worked especially well for me was making a pot sized raise with a strong linear range (resulting in lots of calls) while making a much larger raise to about 1.7x pot with my junk when facing ranges I thought to be weak and wide (resulting in lots of folds).

If your opponents are legitimately terrible, you should adjust significantly to take advantage of their mistakes. The main problem with this idea is that many small stakes players think they are learning a strong default strategy that they can apply as they move up in stakes. When moving up, it is important to figure out what the winners are doing to beat the games you want to move to as well as what to do to beat those winners. Many players figure out how to beat the weak players but forget that the winners are often the losers at the higher stakes.

I strive to teach my students how to succeed long-term, not how to beat specifically the awful players at the tiny stakes. This is done by teaching them to play fundamentally sound and then how to adjust to the situations they are likely to encounter.

I argue that GTO will work better at low stakes than high stakes because those players make vastly more mistakes, so GTO play should work better there.

the question is what is the GTO raise size for 1/2 live. Surely it's not 3x because we have to overcome the rake. Online, where the rake is much smaller, 3x is sufficient. If there were no rake, 2.5x would probably be standard (my own calculations show that 2.25x is possibly correct).

I used to raise to 9 or 10 depending on my position and the strength of my hand. I think anything more than that is a leak. You can be exploited. It doesn't mean you will be exploited but anything other than a "standard" sizing is exploitable. Obviously being exploitable is not necessarily losing. You actually have to play exploitably in some spots to win money in the long run but the math is the math

No way that's true. There's just no way.

Low stakes players make a lot bigger mistakes when you do things intentionally to exploit them and their weaknesses than if you play a robotic GTO style. I have no doubt a good GTO player will win at low stakes but an exploitive player with good reads will do much better.

maybe but pre-flop isn't the place to deviate imo, if you want to exploit bad players you can adjust your frequencies but i don't think you should adjust your raise sizes. I could be wrong

If J Little is recommending a more GTOish 3.5x open, he needs to explain the ranges that accompany the RFI and for what seats. Opening a standard UTG range to 3x against the 1/2 population with no adjustment of range will result in 4 callers and cards-up post flop play.

I do think there is a limit for practical purposes of UTG RFI, of about 7x. Beyond this and the SPR gets skewed too much. However, this is just in theory, I have no live play to back up this opinion.

Just saying that Little needs to explain his stuff more than just saying the top players open for 3x.

I dont think you should adjust your raise sizes either. What I'm saying is at smaller stakes, raising to 3x is less than optimal.

This is a really good post on exploitative play. Way more useful than a lot of nitty PF advice you see here.

I dont know where you dug that up from but its spot on.

only because of the rake tho, the rake is exploiting you so you have to be more exploitable and raise to about 5x at 1/2. I'm playing timed rake at 5/10 and I'm going 30 or 35 pre as is most of the competition. The raise size should settle on a standard amount because those not obeying the math should eventually lose

sizing is such a big issue with most players, back in the day of online poker I was printing money raising to 2.5x or 3x when everyone else was doing 4-5x. That ended pretty abruptly tho. There is a demarcation point in my profit graphs correlating exactly to when everyone else started adjusting their opens downward to 3x. Sad day for me

Rake is always a bigger factor at smaller stakes, but Id say raising more BBs at lower stakes works better more due to the fact that people are lower stakes are much more likely to call raises with things like KT and A8. And a raise to 7BBs instead of 3.5BBs doesnt stop them from doing it.

can't say you are wrong, the great debate between GTO and exploitable play will rage on in Doug Polk videos til the end of time. if your raise size doesn't effect their calling range than obviously it is correct to raise more but I don't know if people are still as bad as they were 6 years ago. Maybe they are

They are

Great thread with some awesome posts in there. Read from beginning. Thanks, Garick for bringing it back again and again.

It's now ten years later and I liked the thread so figured I'd reply. Your predictions are mostly true. Ten years ago llsnl was much softer than today. The internet wannabe pros are still few and far between but folks have a general idea of what leaks are common and how to plug some of them. Players intuitively get a lot more concepts even though few of them could describe their thinking like OL players. LLSNL will always be very beatable though...

3-4 years ago I regularly played with a certain Vietnamese grinder in one of the weaker 2 5 games in the greater Philadelphia area.

That player always opened to 35 even with no limpers with his entire opening range. The game was very loose, very deep and populated with a number of bad regs, so 80+% of the time he got action. The only players that really made him suffer were shortstackers, as sometimes he would be priced in to call shortstack shoves with rather inferior holdings. But other than that minor inconvenience, he was one of the biggest winners in the game.

One time we were eating some ****ty food in the Diamond Lounge and I inquired why he would want to raise that big and would he not benefit from having a bigger SPR if he raised smaller? His philosophy was that since he was one of the best players in the game, he wanted to play the pots that were bigger in order to win more $$$ :-) The game was raked (not timed) by the way.

Note: after 2 5 games stopped running in that casino, the noted player had to move to Parx and adjust his strategy although I would guess that in all likelihood he is still a big winner.