Quote:
Originally Posted by iamblackornot
u cannot afford gto play in a heavily raked game. your best hope is to exploit as much as you can otherwise u d be break-even at best
That's exactly right, and underappreciated. A few years back there were a lot of good players who thought they could just abandon exploitative play because GTO would perform so strongly on its own. The truth is that GTO is extremely weak versus very bad opponents, relative to exploitative play.
I didn't fully explain my thought above about frequencies being 90% of the defensive value of GTO. What might be called the defensive aspects of GTO, things like making us indifferent to bluffing, unable to vbet our marginal hands or being forced to bluffcatch at close to the correct frequencies, those things are what make people extremely difficult to beat. And those aspects of GTO are almost completely reliant on frequencies, ranges just don't matter that much. The difference between bluffcatching with a "well designed" range, taking blockers into account etc will be maybe 1% higher EV that just calling a linear range that creates the right frequency, while, by comparison, not generating the right frequencies can be a catastrophic error.
But while constructing great ranges is quite hard, generating good frequencies is something that many regs, even at the lowest stakes, are able to do surprisingly well. That's because it's something that experienced, good players gain a feel for over years of playing. If a player's within +/-5% of the equilibrium bluffcatching frequency in a given spot, and you don't know which side of it he's on until you play him for 20,000 hands, you really can't exploit him there.
In a rake-free HU game, the better GTO approximation will still beat out the worse GTO approximation by 2,3 even 5bb/100. But when the rake is 15bb/100, these differences are simply being taxed away. Each GTO player is a big loser after rake.
So when that poster says lots of regs are playing GTO, he's techically wrong, but in most ways that matter, he's essentially right.