In “10 Tips for Multiway Pots in Poker” posted February 13, 2023, GTOWizard not only promised to publish multiway post-flop solutions in 2024. It also posted its strategy for multiway, based on its conclusions on how several opponents share the burden of defense. On the one hand, the strategy will be no surprise to the pros. On the other hand, GTOWizard gives the most comprehensive main points of a multiway strategy. I’ve read dozens of books about poker and wasted weeks reading 2+2, but comprehensive discussions of multiway play are slim. GG, Venice, Garick, Chaos, Mlark, and Playbig gave legendary advice to legions of newbies confounded by multiway play. Now, GTOWizard joins them.

The strategy: with more players,

Bluffing is more expensive.
Tighter play yields higher profit.
Range betting is more expensive.
Implied and reverse-implied odds are higher.
The nut potential gains value.
Smaller bets gain value.
Position gains value.
Blockers get amplified.
Capped ranges become less exploitable.

So is GTO multiway new or just the same old? Are we going to spend 2024 arguing about GTO on a live strategy forum?

I think the only one of those that might come as a surprise to an older school mutiway player is the part about smaller bets gaining value. Of course, we've definitely seen movement towards that live in recent years, but it seemed to be more based on 1v1 concepts of range-betting, so to have GTOWizard both note that the range-betting is more expensive and yet also note that smaller bets actually go up in value multi-way is a surprise.

Have they talked about the reasoning behind it?

The math looked more like special relativity to me than poker
n = number of defending players
α = The alpha of a HU bet, which is equal to s/(s+1)
s = bet/pot

This equation seems to yield this chart for the average defense required per player to meet MDF:

Average defense per player is a canard. I don’t have time for a long post right now but there are 2 big problems here: firstly, that the defense burden is not equally shared; and second, that the nature of exploitation—both when and how—is going to be vastly different than heads-up. We should very likely have a hair-trigger willingness to deviate from “GTO” principles even if we can assume this is correct.

GTOWizard agrees with you. While all players share the burden of defense, they share it unequally. GTO aims to show how this unequality maps onto players based on position and preflop actions. Heads up, hero always benefits from an error by a V. Multiway, an error by one V usually helps but sometimes harms hero. For this reason there is no straightforward GTO solution to multiway, according to GTOWizard. It claims it has developed multiple algorithms that can nonetheless approximate the solution. They are going to publish these approximate solutions in 2024.

Live no limit differs from online and high stakes in players deviating from GTO, hence the many multiway pots. As long as GTO was for heads up only, it had less to say about live no limit. But if it gives multiway solutions, we are fools to ignore it.

I think perhaps you might not have the right idea about when and why we're supposed to deviate from GTO.

Imagine you are heads-up and your opponent bets into you on a flush-completing river. You will obviously always raise the nuts, and theoretically you're supposed to raise as a bluff with the nut blocker some of the time too. If you believe that you stop your analysis there because GTO always wins heads-up, you might miss the fact that if your opponent is only betting with flushes and never folding them, you'll outperform GTO by shelving the bluff-raises.

To generalize the example, we don't deviate from "GTO" (assuming we've correctly found it) because we're worried about losing if we play it; we deviate because we want to win more than GTO, which is almost always possible (though debatable how attainable it is obviously).

The effect of this sort of thinking is even more pronounced multiway, not just because of more people making mistakes, but also because of the fact that when one person makes a mistake, we can't just worry about how we exploit that mistake--we also have to worry about the other players in the multiway pot deviating to take advantage of the mistake. And as you said, in a multiway situation, GTO is not even guaranteed to win. So it is probably going to be the case that in any game we play, studying GTO too closely ends up being a waste.

Purely from a bet sizing standpoint, to build on what Garick was saying, there's a whole line of analysis about how we might consider changing our bet sizing from whatever "GTO" says to adjust for the fact that when loose fish are in the hand, their calling mistakes will be padding the pot for other players' calls or raises to no longer be mistakes when they might have been at equilibrium.

Im very surprised to see position as gaining value. I feel like i could profitably play 1/3 HUIP spots (with my correct preflop range) without even looking at my cards. Multiway i either hit or i dont.

As someone who dabbles in Omaha this does not surprise me at all. Being able to extract value from big hands or take a free card to avoid a check-raise is extremely important, and conversely when you miss a raise with a big hand or have to lead out because you are worried about it checking through, it becomes harder to extract when you hit. (Also I assume that if you are playing correctly your bluffs are much more believable and effective in position.)

I agree with all that, but position is always very important, including multiway, so merely arguing that it has great value isnt that convincing to me that its MORE important. Multiway, you often see a bet before it reaches you, and then youre getting squeezed between the bettor and the OOP players and your position becomes less relevant. Heads up as the aggressor is basically always checked to you, giving you full control of the flop.

The other thing ill say is that im also less inclined to be the third or fourth person to call a raise on the button, both because the odds of being squeezed is higher and because i have the opportunity to squeeze myself.

I don’t think these arguments are convincing for one simple reason: you are trying to give arguments based on what you would typically see in a live multi-way pot, while the idea here is to try to imagine a multi-way pot played at equilibrium. I expect those to be very, very different, and in particular, if c-betting frequencies at equilibrium are way lower than we are used to, you’ll be IaP but OOrP a lot less. A LOT less.

Why do we even think there is only one equilibrium for mulitway play?

I don’t think there is. But this is a post about GTO Wizard’s upcoming announcements and I am guessing they will claim there is only one. (Why do we think there is only one for HU, while we’re at it?)