Tldr version for anyone that wants to jump in this somewhat lighthearted thread;

OP - some days I’m not feelin it
Various - feel should be irrelevant
Oldsilver - if you’re not feelin it then take a break
Various - don’t take a break, get better through PIO
Oldsilver - PIO wont help you in-game / real-time
Various - if you don’t know equilibrium then no amount of feel will help
Oldsilver - true, but once a good feel / exploit player knows equilibrium they will crush soulless gto grinders when field is mid stakes and full of errors to exploit
Oldsilver - as example, we can exploit based on stereotype
Various - bored now, you may be racist
New various - sklansky goes to QuikEMart, says it’s ok

This is where I had to get out, because in my mind there is no distinction between GTO and exploitative play, ie if you're studying Pio to purely mimick Pio then you're just doing it wrong (although as mentioned that is the baseline). We can also study how our opponents deviate from equilibrium and thereby how to optimally exploit them (which is when we should deviate from equilibrium), gathering heuristics on population exploits. This is a natural and obvious process for a thinking player - not just some GTO theory.

However, your statement about a good exploit player crushing a player that's plays pure GTO is obviously nonsensical with GTO being by its very nature unexploitable. Yes a very good exploit player with a GTO baseline will make more money than a player trying play pure GTO without exploiting, but that is irrelevant since what we're doing by studying Pio is trying to become that very good exploit player with a GTO baseline.

We can see from this forum let alone our games how bad we all are (how much we all deviate from equilibrium and therefore how exploitable we all are) and therefore the natural first step is learning equilibrium heuristics.

I did not say that an exploit player would have an advantage heads up against a perfect GTO player.

I said that if exploit player and GTO player played the same tournament against an exploitable field, then the exploit player would have a higher expected return.

I think you covered that in the second part.

We're kinda circling the point I'm trying to make though.

You're saying:

that we can use PIO to distil both equilibrium and optimal exploit heuristics from a large sample of hands and get something approximating perfect exploit play that will cover such a wide range of potential hands / situations that we will rarely have to resort to human soft calculation or 'feel'

I'm saying:

that we can use PIO to distil both equilibrium and optimal exploit heuristics from a large sample of hands and get something approximating perfect exploit play that will cover such a small subset of the full range of potential hands / situations that we will frequently have to resort to human soft calculation or 'feel'

I certainly take your point that the greater the amount of work you do on modelling optimal exploit lines in PIO, the better your understand of optimal exploits overall and the better the chance that your human guesswork in unfamiliar spots will get it right.

Just don't expect PIO to give you all the answers. Life's too short to do all the calculations, and our brains are too feeble to remember and apply the heuristic rules even if you could.

tldr;

'Feel' will imho forever be an important element in mhsmtt poker, no matter how good you are.

I'd like to see it turn into a discussion of what demographics should and shouldn't jam in this spot. Or, against what demographics should the 4bettor call a shove with a wider range than against other demographics.

Okay. But is it possible to develop 'feel' in the sense you're talking about? Because if it isn't then it's rather a mute point, because what we CAN do to develop our game is study our databases/HH's/Pio and whatever natural feel ability we have is going to express itself in game regardless to supplement that.

Disclaimer (and you know this): I'm relatively new to Pio but this is how I've come to understand things after a moderate amount of recent work. What I'm saying is likely very basic, but the more I study game theory/get experience with Pio, the more this will develop

I hear ya on the tournament part. Focusing on tournaments for long periods of time is tough. Doing anything for a long period, and the brain will get bored imop. My health isn't the greatest not sure if that makes it worse. But I just think its normal, if you try do anything for 6 hours straight, your gonna lose focus and get bored.

lol Feel players

Sounds to me you need to work more on your mental game. Reason being because I can relate to this so much and I found the mental game of poker by Jared Tendler 1&2 improved my game in this sort of area immensely it’s worth checking out and if you already did go back and check it again trust me I read it twice and have it on audible so I can listen to it a hour before I go to bed it’s short and really amazing input that maximized my results. I’m still in the process mind you but thanks for the post I hope I could have helped as much as yours helped me !

I agree ☝️

I know this isn’t my thread and sorry if I hijacked it a little but I have to say Well said, I’ve been investing more in online coaching websites and doing the work like I’m back in school lol And it’s only a tear drop in the lake but I’m starting to think differently. I believe the mental game is my issue right now I do well in small-mid stakes cash games but now being in NYC a covid nightmare for the first time in 6 years I’m playing online and I’m sure you could imagine the difference now that I’m playing on a phone/computer with so many more hands per hour it is very stressful but your advice is golden thank you!