Thank you.

Bryce, a lot of us are accustomed to playing extremely exploitively rather than trying to play GTO poker at HUNL. The people who say "WTF, why would I raise bigger, I don't want them to fold" are saying that because the live ones are playing way too many pots out of position. By raising bigger, you give them an obvious opportunity to improve their play by correctly folding more often.

It's true that when they don't adapt, you are in good shape, but my experience has been that they start folding more often and/or leave the table once you change the dynamic, and it's better to keep making the exploitive play than to risk losing EV.

As for GTO, I think that optimal play with reasonable stack sizes is going to involve making a preflop raise that leaves you with 3 pot-sized bets postflop, because then you have maximum control over the final pot size while being able to ensure PSBs on all streets. With deeper stacks or versus an aggressive opponent you might want to shoot for 4 PSBs to take into account reraises.

bryce,

while HU limit may be solved using math, NL is not and never will be. You adjusting to a raise of 4x instead of 3x when the stacks are 200 BBs is meaningless. Nitpicking tiny little spots like this will not make the difference between u being able to beat your opponent or failing. NL is a whole different animal and you will probably wind up finding yourself pegging certain players as "fish" because they don't understand some dumb math/game theory concept and before u know it u are out ur money. all your game theory optimal crap doesnt work in nl unless u got skills to go with it

This is utter BS and judging by your post you seem to lack understanding of how game theory works in general.

Sounds like you've found yourself some action, Bryce

first, u don't understand why math can never solve HU NL because you dont even play lol. You are in no position to argue this if you don't play the game. and you are correct i do not understand the first thing of game theory and it doesnt matter in the slightest

All this stuff just cannot be applied to NL. You cannot look at situations in a vacuum. Every single big pot is a unique situation and needs an accounting of flow and mindset of both opponents of which this gto stuff will never give you. You can't just blanket say that b/c of these calculations optimal bluff % is x. That's just incorrect, vs some players its gonna be way higher, others way lower. And not only that, vs some players it will be higher 20 minutes into the match and way lower 20 minutes later. Match dynamics change constantly. Maybe I'm missing something? This approach will just never work in nl if you take it as gospel overriding your own intuition

and you show how you know nothing about game theory

nyc i recommend reading bryce's recent 2p2 article

here is a link

http://twoplustwo.com/magazine/issue38/paradis_0208.php

i think nyc is correct here.....

blanket GTO statements dont work for NL

did you even read the article? imo clearly what you guys are talking about are exploitive strategies which can be better than a GTO strategy. that's not saying that GTO strategy doesn't apply.

i'm no expert on this stuff, but it seems pretty apparent, maybe bryce can explain further

lol i am not talking about an "exploitative" strategy vs GTO optimal. THERE'S NO SUCH THING AS GTO OPTIMAL in nl or any of this. These all assume that an opponent's actions as a whole can be quantified, put into a vacuum, and calculated, which is not possible. you seem to not have understand what i've been saying, ill wait for bryce to respond

Actually, if you're willing to generalize a bit and work with a handful of fixed bet sizes NL problems can often be easier to solve than LHE problems, because there are so many fewer compounding decisions. Exploitive analysis in the vein of "if this condition is true this is profitable" is actually often extremely easy with NL.

The value of GTO strategy isn't in trying to play GTO, necessarily, but understanding, at least roughly, what GTO play might looks like does help you to be able to exploit your opponent maximally (more on that in the article somebody linked) and hence my interest in GTO stuff as opposed to exploitive stuff.

You are completely clueless.

very coherent, well thought out response by the top railbird. thank you

and my results say otherwise!

results oriented thinking, IMO

edit: if he played he'd prob be better than you. he has coached many many people who are now much better than you.

i challenge you to name 1

and lol THE GUY DOESNT EVEN PLAY THE GAME. you know how easy it is to armchair QB any hand you hear on a forum? gimme a break. This is like saying that because I can properly break down a play on game film that I am qualified to be a coordinator in the nfl

nycballer, i guarantee you that if we took a lineup of the top NL players and both you and MDMA played them, he would fare significantly better than you right out of the gate (whether it's a tough 6handed game or a tough HU match).

you clearly don't understand math or game theory well enough and are just dismissing it because you're too lazy to think about it and your results against fish pacify you to the point where you don't need to think about it.

actually, there is

edit: is GTO game theory? and if so, will someone teach me it? i seriously know nothing beyond the 3 minutes i heard about it in a math class freshman year of college before i fell asleep.

Just getting around to reading this thread, and wanted to comment on it since it seems good. The 2nd half of this (tighter players should raise more preflop) is actually incorrect. It's counterintuitive, but the looser you are, the larger your raise size, the tighter, the smaller. (it should be)

NYC I'm going into school tomorrow to hand in my Game Theory to Roger Myerson who won a nobel about 4 months back. Shall I ask him whether there is a GTO way to play NLH HU? Let's put a large sum of money on the line OK? I'm 100% serious, put up or shut up. And don't come out with some lame line like how Myerson can't answer cos he's never played poker. Just put up or stfu, kindly.

This just isn't true. The problem is that this attempts to portray the hands as having a linear "value", but this clearly isn't the way hands are meant to be analyzed. Q5o being a preflop favorite over 78s doesn't make it better, because Q5o doesn't often improve drastically in value on the flop/turn/river, whereas 78s can. This gives you a degree of flexibility post flop than someone with a very tight range can possess.

If your range is very tight, you want to raise bigger so that you can at least have a pretty large part of your tight range to be "bluffs" which can actually get a hand to fold.

NO body folds preflop

Actually, the GTO angle here is to actually raise less, as your opponent is less inclined to join pots as the overall quality of your raising range improves. Raising whatever amount with tight ranges is an (extremely common) exploitive angle in NL which basically amounts to "he can have the small pots, I will just wait for him to mess up in the big pots." Against an opponent who plays equally well as you in the big pots you would lose with such a strategy.