Really not true. Against an unknown you're much better off estimating the population's strategy and playing max exploit against that. All of the hands you've played and watched with players who weren't your opponent is perfectly valid data for using Bayesian inference to put an unknown on a range/strategy. Filtering that data based on the player's race/age/occupation etc is valid as well.

On the other hand, GTO might be a good choice against an unknown pro, i.e. someone who is known to be a pro but you have no idea how he plays.

I like your post. However, if I didn't think the reads (especially the sigh read) were strong/pretty damn reliable I wouldn't have posted them. Some things are just too natural. His sigh was legit.

results:



thx for the replies

Were you thinking of getting freaky?

I think I have to. People almost never check good hands to hero fold. But they will bet them to...

Yea not a fan at all of the half pot sizing Otr

The opposite of GTO is LPO (live poker optimal). You take advantage of the slowness of the game mainly, but you also attack emotion, risk aversion (or the lack thereof), poor/false perceptions, tells, reverse tells, lack of balance (in the few high volume/trackable spots), etc.

When you are in the bb in a single raised 4-way pot where the OR is a weak player who opened a pretty nitty range utg, utg +1- a pretty weak nit in his own right called, and co- a fake fish who is bad but won't go all the way also called before you did, and the flop is JJ6dd and it checks to co who bets 3/4 pot in such away that he wants no action/he has a pp here a ton (he's trying to look super strong and confident but he's not) and you are all 300+ bbs deep to start the hand, you only c/r the part of your range that doesn't have him crushed- and you do it with each hand instantly.

There is no balance for this spot. There is no %. It's just basic, mind-numbing LPO play that has always been and will always continue to be the most profitable approach to live poker. One of the 2 (maybe) other good players at the table will know what you are doing and will say something like, "show the bluff", and you will or won't depending on what you think the game/your image needs. And it's completely fine that he knew what you were doing. You weren't playing against him. He would have been a new/different variable to consider.

I think it reps the most value hands (just as many as 500 does, but has less perceived bluffs). That was my only goal in this hand because I thought I could only get called by one combo.

Not exactly sure what effective stacks are but I think all in or like 150-200% psb is a much better choice than half pot

Pretty sure there is 1 combo in his range that doesn't fold to my sizing. Also, call, call, over bet is just so bipolar I'm not sure it folds out that much more that much more often. Maybe tho.

I would never raise flop. River I would bet really big (overbet) or check back. I feel like once he checks river he's checking to call because it will be easy for him to come up with a lot of combos that you bluff on river.

With your specific hand I don't like a small bet to fold out his Broadway diamonds because we block them, and we bet a good amount of his give ups.

So I would lean towards checking back our hand and when I bet I would go large.

Fwiw I don't think I'd be raising much on flop or turn, so I don't view the call call overbet as "bipolar"

If the strategy in the spot you described works, then it works, and there's really no arguing with that.

It's just a bit odd when people are so stuck on a spot that they go to the trouble to write up a HH about it, but then when someone provides a strategy that guarantees that they'll make a profit in this spot regardless of how villain plays, they're not open to that perspective (I'm talking in general, not about OP, I don't even remember what thread I'm posting in at this point). Especially when so many of the HHs start with like, "Villain is mostly unknown, but he {seems aggressive/is a winner at higher stakes/plays weird/is shuffling chips/is wearing a funny hat/has a punchable face}."

If there's an LPO strategy you feel confident employing in a spot, then by all means employ it. If you are stuck and have no idea what to make of villain's strategy, then thinking of it from a GTO perspective might at least be a decent start.

How would you have played AA/KK/AK in this spot?

Just saying from his perspective we would have just called twice in position with two pair or a set on a wet board and suddenly we are over betting. We went from super passive to super aggro. Villain might think that's weird enough to hero call the same range he's calling 620 with.

Even with all the strong opinions itt, isn't it as simple as this...?

...Especially because of this?

OP expressed concern over bipolar (FOS) River sizing, but hero found the only card that his heavily perceived/repped Ax range (that was previously on track to ck back/decide non Ax riv) should now be able to comfortably size larger for a bluff -- it is reasonably looking for fat value against smaller Ax (which Villain could often think hero thinks villain has) leaving 35dd (maybe 22 or A2) as the only hands that Villain should be able to tank call here.

I usually post hands to settle arguments. Sometimes I post them purely for sanity checks. This one I just thought was v interesting (mainly because of the sigh/range scale down pre flop).

I hardly think all the "GTO posts" on 2p2 guarantee profit. Almost always the ranges are too wide and/or weighted incorrectly imo, and people are often misguided when it comes to what tendencies are at different stakes amongst different segments of the population. Also the math is wrong a lot as well...

Even when they are pretty good (the "GTO posts"), even when they are profitable, I don't think they are usually most profitable. I typically don't want my opponent indifferent to calling or folding on a river or whatever. I want him to make a huge mistake a huge % of the time.

Just found this and browsed it and it seems pretty good for this discussion:

http://ca.pokernews.com/strategy/gam...ld-em-5092.htm

Lastly, I think it's good to argue on these forums (as long as you do it respectfully), otherwise it's just one big boring groupthink and no one gets better (at thinking or playing).

There's an error in that article.

"The appropriate response to a perfectly balanced Rock, Paper, and Scissors range is to be perfectly balanced yourself."

At least in Rock Paper Scissors specifically it doesn't matter what you do against a perfectly balanced strategy.

This is obviously different from poker where if you play against a perfectly balanced strategy your maximum expectation is to break even, which you will only do if you play a perfectly balanced strategy as well. All other strategies lose.

I could say that, in a way, the more I've learned about GTO play the less often I use that knowledge at the table. But I think that would be misleading. I always think these conversation are stupid, because to me there is clearly one way to attempt to play.

Ideally in every spot I first try to think about what a GTO (or close to it) strategy might look like for me and my opponent. If I know nothing else about him (including no relevant population reads) then I attempt to approximate GTO. But this underling knowledge of theory helps me pick the most LPO response as well as I accumulate reads, because I'm better able to understand how I've deviated from GTO up to this point, how my opponent has, how he is likely to continue to deviate later in the hand, how my range will want to respond, and then finally what I think this exact hand in my range wants to do based on all this information.

In day to day poker playing against el oh el live pros most of the GTO analysis I do is subconscious. I already have an idea of what GTO might look like for spots, and I already have an idea of how people are deviating and what I should do. So there's no active though about GTO for me in most spots--it's all LPO.

But that's only because I've internalized so much of the GTO stuff.

Someone I think brought up Jason Sommerville in this thread. He's definitely an exploitive player, and I think his approach HANDICAPS him. He will only ever be able to win at X level, because he doesn't have that deeper understanding of WHY he does what he does, how his opponent should respond, etc.

Durrrr is an even better example of "LPO." But his master exploit strategy also handicapped him. He doesn't appear to have had a deep enough understanding of why he did what he was doing, couldn't adjust to the new crop of players with a deeper understanding of the game, and now he's broke.

Cliffs: GTO wasn't really bad for me

Also I think the vast majority of people who think they play GTO or try to talk about things from a GTO standpoint are
FOS and don't realize they're actually talking exploitively

Again, my post wasn't directed at you. I'd actually forgotten you were OP, or else I would've been clearer that while I was responding to you in a thread started by you, I wasn't talking about you per se.

But I think a LOT of hand histories involve people getting in tough spots because they're using their generic strategy against someone who doesn't play super straightforward, and now that they're facing an aggressive line from an aggressive player--a line that they don't usually face but shouldn't be *too* surprised that they're facing given they're playing an unknown, non-straightforward player--they don't know what to do. Very often, some kind of vague consideration of how to plug up some obvious exploitabilities in your game can be at least a helpful thought exercise. That sentence is purposefully loaded with qualifiers because I don't think any old post that uses the words "GTO" and "unexploitable" and "equilibrium" are going to be "the answer"; just that it can be a helpful perspective.

I agree that GTO is an ideal, and not every invocation of it like it's some magical hand chart you can refer to is going to be helpful. LPO is also an ideal. A lot of posts that rely heavily on population tendencies are very often wrong and/or misapplied as well. Maybe people who use GTO language are as a whole more misguided than people who use exploitative language (I honestly don't know), but in either case, this doesn't say anything about how helpful the concept itself is.

I absolutely, totally, whole-heartedly agree with this, ESPECIALLY at lollive poker. I don't think for the purposes of discussing a HH, though, you have to choose one or the other. Even when applying strategies, it's helpful to view exploitative strategy as a deviation from some unexploitable strategy and understand why that deviation is taking place.

An example: Sosososo many live TAGs understand that cbetting is something you do with all of your hands that are good enough to value bet, all your draws that are good enough to semi with, all your backdoors that like enough turns to barrel with, and even a good percentage of total airball hands on a good percentage of boards. Against the vast majority of players, it doesn't matter how far of a deviation this is from equilibrium, it doesn't matter why it works perfectly fine for them to deviate from equilibrium against those players, and you probably don't even have to understand what kind of players that strategy DOESN'T work against in order to sustain a winrate in these games.

But in any HH where Hero's cbet gets raised by an aggressive unknown player (or the turn gets bombed when they check back a marginal hand, or they feel obligated to cbet a marginal hand because they don't want to turn their hand faceup against an aggressive player), I think it's helpful to at least *consider* what a good, airtight overall strategy with our whole range might look like.

So in practice, in any one spot, GTO and maximum exploitation are mutually exclusive, but for the purposes of discussing different HHs from multiple perspectives, I think there's room for both in the discussion. And I think really good players with really good fundamentals are able to have both work together hand-in-hand.

Agreed. I enjoy the discussion, and I recognize that I am on your turf, so I appreciate that you appreciate dissention

I can maybe illustrate what I mean with a real-world example of a discussion:

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/32...70bbs-1350859/

CLIFFNOTE: Someone posts a hand asking if they made a good call with AK for their whole stack in early stages of a live tourney. Multiple people who play live tourneys respond with what is probably the most profitable response: "No, fold, no sense in choosing this hand to defend with."

Spladle (who plays high-stakes online HU cash games, which is about as opposite of a live donkament as it gets) provides a GTO perspective for what OP should do, and he "should" actually call.

Several people respond with ~"This is live poker, people don't play GTO, so you don't have to worry about playing exploitatively."

Spladle writes some *really* good posts explaining how opponents don't have to play GTO for you to prefer playing GTO yourself. There is no dispute over whether villain sucks, but some people suck in such a way that calling is bad, while others suck in a way that folding is even worse than if villain didn't suck.

BTW, I can vouch for Spladle's argument because I can think of a million players I've played against who overshove 70bbs over 3bbs with such an absurd range that folding AK would be farrrrr worse to do against them than it is to do against someone whose overshoving range makes more sense (or at least as much sense as it can).

BUT, the kicker is that I actually agree with the live tournament posters on this one. I just think they're right for the wrong reasons. If even just one single poster had written this post, then they would have perfectly bridged the gap from the GTO perspective to the exploitative perspective:

"Those players who spew off 70bbs with an overshove with anything less than AK are plentiful in many contexts, but they are almost non-existent in $225 BI live tournaments. The population in this game STRONGLY tends toward only doing this with a range that dominates AK, so you should exploit this absurd strategy of only overshoving premiums by folding here."

That's it, Spladle probably would've said, "Fair enough, you know these games better than me," and rode off into the night. Instead, everyone was spouting BS about how everyone sucks and so GTO is irrelevant.

So I guess my point is that GTO and exploitative play can be bridged very easily. Just say what an unexploitable strat might look like, then consider reads, then determine how that read affects how you should deviate from GTO, understanding that these players are SOOO bad at life, that you can deviate quite wildly from it. I think the disconnect comes a lot of times when people see no value whatsoever in one perspective or the other and so make no attempt to bridge the two.

Don't wanna say. But I think it's a tough sell that I wouldn't have raised them up until river. Also KK and AA seem like really weird overbets on that runout.

I thought my line repped Ax super hard. Nothing more (I didn't think I needed more once he led flop) and not much less (aside from him putting the pfr on a fd when he also has one on an A-high board- which is rare).

Excellent post.

My stance is that live poker will never become a GTO fest for several already very belabored (by me) reasons.

...

Once one person starts playing GTO rock paper scissors, it's just a flip, no? I remember a NL game I was in broke down and people started playing RPS for money. I bet on someone who I thought would have a reading/leveling edge and he threw completely randomly based on the clock on the wall. I was like wtf, what's the point?

They asked me to play and I said no, no, no... and then finally agreed. At first I used (the reverse of) the basic patterns against them (I knew they would think I was a RPS fish). Then I would start talking in between throws and I would give off false tells while picking up legit stuff from them. And finally I preloaded paper extremely subtly and saw that my opponent saw it and then I just threw rock and scooped.

^^^ sounds like a brag but it's not. I wouldn't be able to get away with all that **** a second time, and might have just run hot anyways. The point is, there is a lot of info/tools available in a live setting and wtf is the point of playing GTO when you can play LPO and have a much higher win rate against almost everyone?

Not sure when/how this turned into a gto discussion but my last thought is that you can lol prty nicely at him when he stations your over bet all in w a8o and you flip up ak

The best part about this whole hand is that a "wide range spot" isn't really wide at all. I think with his preflop tell and flop lead we can narrow his range down into a few combos. The hard part is that giving off the tell in the first place as well as leading this flop texture are two things so unbecoming of a "pro" that the read itself has as got to be very seriously in doubt.

"I hope you have AQ" - because that is the absolute top of your range and the hand he is missing the most value on when he check / calls river?!?! This comment makes no sense. Does he expect this to be the worst hand you are betting for value?

Yea that comment made me lol actually. Unless it's a level in which case it's superb. Matter of fact...I'm gonna use that one.