We should probably move the general GTO theory to another thread but I'll respond to this one here.
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Originally Posted by md46135
From what I know, GTO is a defensive strategy that guarantees no loss against any other possible strategy, it doesn't say anything about winnings.
Yeah, it is defensive in the way that it doesn't attack a specific weakness. However, It has two guarantees. (a) it never loses to any other strategy, including GTO strats, and (b) it wins money from any non-gto strategy.
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Consider a game of rock-paper-scissors. If you know someone likes to choose paper a lot, then you choosing more scissors then what GTO says (33.33%) should be a strategy which will produce bigger winnings. I don't see why the same wouldn't apply to poker.
True. But in this case, you know what the GTO strategy is, i.e. choose each option 1/3 of the time. If you know the GTO strategy already
and you have extra exploitative information on your opponent, then you can maximize your profits from deviating from the GTO strategy in the correct cases. However, in poker, we humans don't know how to play GTO.
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Imagine if you play against a passive fish who almost never raises and mostly just checks, but loves to call. What do you think is the best thing to do with a middle strength hand out of position?
I'm not so sure GTO would do so great at smaller stakes where it would do a lot of bad bluffcatching and miss value when trying to check-raise instead of just going for a bet.
A fish makes mistakes in every single hand they play. A human explo strategy catches some of those mistakes and exploits it, but nowhere near all of them. A human explo strategy is also randomly giving value back to the fish by misplaying many spots.
A gto strategy never gives away any value. It just doesn't fully exploit some spots, but it crushes in all others. It will never make "bad bluffcatches", just neutral ones.
To be the ultimate winner though, it would be best to know what the GTO play is as a baseline and then deviate when your read tells you that you can exploit. But we're still missing the first part as humans, and might never get there.
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Sure, it should be a winning strategy but I doubt these winrates would be something out of this world.
I was actually in your boat on this before, and this point was argued theoretically back and forth. But now we have experiments (Cepheus, Libratus...) that show what a near GTO strategy does vs human opposition. And it is basically "out of this world" (15bb/100 vs experts, no human comes close to that).
Last edited by Wolfram; 06-27-2018 at 07:08 AM.