The average reg in a lot of not so tough games overbluffs spots where it is easy to end up with so many natural bluffs, and underbluffs spots where you don't have many natural bluff candidates.

A solver and a trainer are very effective tools for helping you to see why you're making those mistakes, and what you should be doing instead.

Guilty of this. When I first started playing, a chart of those groups pretty much served as an early guide in online NLHE SNGs and MTTs. Probably not that egregious when stacks were deeper but it was also informing my push-fold decisions if/when we got to shorter effective stacks. You can immediately envision some spots I must have had flat-out wrong – e.g. shoving or calling off with some hands that should have been folded, or folding hands with which I should have jammed.

It did not take long to get a feel for other players' calling ranges, then adjust accordingly. But I'll admit that it took longer than it should have for me to realize why and how I was misusing the chart.

People in live cash games are way too dependent on solvers.

It you're ever in a live game and you're not playing super high you're absolutely wasting your time it the game is so bad you need to play GTO.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. Against a 5 year old who puts paper 90 percent of the time In rock paper scissors the guy with a brain puts down scissors over and over again and the gto boy randomizes and puts rock paper scissors down each 1/3 of the time and he wins in the process.

He still wins but nowhere near what he should.


The whole theory of gto is to not be exploited.

Well wtf game worth playing doesnt have a table full of people who couldn't exploit you if they could see your hole cards.

Some chicken famer isn't going to exploit you.


Act accordingly.

What youre saying is his frequencies are wrong and need to be adjusted

That doesn’t mean gto is a waste of time

Incorrect. The whole theory of gto is to remain unexploited whilst exploiting villain to the maximum.

It's defensive in that it defines its offense first and then works back from there to plug as many holes as it can. Which is just good solid play anyway.

This ties into the huge misunderstandings of GTO on poker forums.

It's an overloaded term. What you're describing is "equilibrium". Equilibrium strategies are unexploitalbe, but I'd say we shouldn't even call this GTO, because it's not even optimal (the O in GTO).

The exploitative strategy is optimal.

If you look up a generic GTO solution it's going to show you equilbirium because there's 1 of those and effectively infinite exploitative solutions, but that doesn't mean you study solvers to stick to equilbirum no matter what. It's a strawman that nobody argues.

Here's a mathematical fact : there exists a GTO solution that maximally exploits the chicken farmer's strategy.

The best way to find that exploitative, GTO , chicken-farmer-crusher strategy is by doing solver work.

Exploitaitive strategy means solver work, but it's been co-opted by people who mean "making **** up / playing by feels". Why? Because studying is hard. And there's a massive market of people who don't want to study but want to feel like theyre learning anyway.

What content do you think will do better, content that tells traders they can buy Gamestop stock and SHIB token and go to the moon, or deep dives on Black-Scholes models and Kelly criterion? Obviously the first will do better in a consumer market but Wall St quants are using the latter. And similarly, content that says you can play "exploitatively" will say you don't need to study solvers but people actually doing effective exploitative poker are studying solvers.

And sure you can beat the chicken-farmer without it but you'll beat him for a lot more if you study actual GTO/exploitative poker to figure out how. And if you actually hang out in the poker community long enough, it's obvious that the vast majority of top players like Haxton, Chidwick, Foxen, Polk have all talked solvers quite extensively while the dudes hawking "you don't need GTO to beat 1/2" are still playing 1/2 instead of , you know, beating it and moving up.

$1 bets per round
5 year old Max Exploit Rock (0%) Paper (0%) Scissors (100%)
Rock (5%) - / - / -0.05
Paper (90%) - / - / 0.9
Scissors (5%) - / - / 0
EV/round for the max exploitative player 0.85

5 year old GTO Rock (33%) Paper (33%) Scissors (33%)
Rock (5%) 0 / 0.0165 / -0.0165
Paper (90%) -0.297 / 0 / 0.297
Scissors (5%) 0.0165 / -0.0165 / 0
EV/round 0


We all know GTO vs GTO is breakeven, but kinda good for people to remember that, vs someone not playing GTO, the only thing optimal does for you is to guarantee you don't lose the EV you're supposed to have vs the toughest bot, that is, 0. So, the kid is not exploiting you.

Yet, even though the kid is playing a dumb strategy, you don't gain anything vs him by playing GTO.

Food for thought.

Rock Paper Scissors isn't the best analogy because in RPS it's impossible to make an EV mistake against the GTO strategy. In poker if you don't know GTO you are going to be making EV mistakes all the time which gives the solid, non-exploiting player a winrate

Do you guys think it’s good advice to dispense away with GTO and use reads / common sense plays?

I study solvers and prelfop charts then do the complete opposite. So utg I’m folding top 10% and playing the rest. Solver nerds haven’t run the Strats vs these ranges so I just annihilate them

You can, but knowing how gto functions and adapts to imbalances will supercharge those reads. When you understand the basic building blocks of GTO (i.e. indifference) the rest of the game makes a lot more sense too. It's also effectively quite a useful way of visualing lots of complicated math. Which is nice.

You misspelled "Nash equilibrium." If one player is far from Nash, the game-theory-optimal play is to exploit the living **** out of them.

Exploitative strategy exists without GTO.
To say otherwise is silly.

And yes Haxton Foxen Chidwick etc play GTO in super tough high limit games against a field of mainly crushers. It makes perfect in such an environment.

There's also a ton of room b/w 1/2 nl and high rollers. The games are largely filled with bad players GTO is suboptimal against.

If you're dream in life is to play higher rollers (and let's be honest that entire community in incestuous with people swapping sharing backers etc. ) then yes you need to play GTO.

GTO is great in tough fields with extremely narrow edges


Tough fields with extremely small edges just don't provide a good win rate unless you're getting in mass volume online or playing very high.

If you play gto plays the same strat it would play versus another gto opponent than yes you give up a lot ev versus the chicken farmer If you were somehow able to dissect the chicken farmers strategy than gto absolutely crushes the chicken farmer..

I feel as though there is a lot of talking past each other here. People saying the same things but just in different languages.

GTO is nothing more than taking the fundamentals of poker (as expressed by Sklansky decades ago) and computing them perfectly.

Take the infamous chicken farmer from this thread. Let's say his deviations from perfect strategy is that he calls too much (both pre and post flop). If his tendencies and ranges are input correctly, a solver is going to spit out play charts that have a player bluffing less and value betting more. Probably suggesting both a wider pre-flop calling and raising range.

This is no different than what poker fundamentals would suggest.

When a solver using player puts in the tendencies of Mr. Chicken Farmer into a solver and compares the results to basic GTO strategy (i.e. strategy against another player playing perfectly), he will obviously get different results from 'basic strategy'. The key is understanding WHY the differences exist.

A player could blindly take the solver results of his inputs on Mr Chicken Farmer and do fine against him, bur someone who understands WHY certain adjustments are made will do better. For two reasons. One, understanding the WHY will help a player better input Mr Chicken Farmer's tendencies into the solver. He will better grasp the nuances of Mr Chicken Farmer's play. Two, it will help him play better when instead of playing Mr. Chicken Farmer, he is playing Mr. Turkey Farmer.

Playing the solver output of Mr. Chicken Farmer against Mr. Turkey Farmer is probably close enough to still be exceptionally profitable, but understanding the WHY would help him make further refinements and be even more profitable.

Players blindly using solver output without understanding the WHY will probably do ok, but the ones who understand the WHY will do better because the can make the subtle adjustments as more information about an opponent's play becomes available.

Finally, I think the better approach between fundamental versus solver should depend upon the type of game the player "grew up" playing. If a player is looking to advance up in stakes as fast as possible, a solver based approach is probably best. If a player is just looking to play at a certain low level where they will meet a wide range of players, then a fundamental based approach is better because while it will never be as perfect as a solver, it lends to more flexibility on the fly.

Either way, I think posters here are getting hung up on a solver versus fundamental approach when in reality they are the same if done correctly.

Bingo. Turns out a lot of kids who dropped out of college to play poker should have stayed in college and taken some actual game theory.

They don't "play GTO". I can guarentee you that at the high rollers, they are looking for exploits against players and population tendencies.

The exploits you would use at 1/2 and in a high roller are different, they play completely differently, obviously. The biggest difference is that GTO will work MUCH better at 1/2 because the exploits are much bigger.

Can you find exploits without solver study? Of course, if someone never folds, you never bluff, you don't need a solver for that. But there's many more you can find if you use a rigorous lens.

The high roller players didn't inherit a trust fund and a copy of piosolver and just start playing $50ks, they worked their way up from smaller games , and the ones that actually thought hard and studied and leveraged software worked their way higher.

If you insist on a misunderstanding that "GTO = "unexploitable balanced strategy" , and can't understand that that's not GTO but rather
an equilbrium strategy, then the conversation hits a roadblock

Nobody said they inherited trust funds. They obviously work extremely hard and are super smart.
Of course exploits will be bigger in soft fields.
That's my point.

If you put one of those guys in some random 2/5 lineup and they had a prop bet where they had to win a large amount of money (so they're actually taking it seriously) they're going to deviate a ton from GTO. In the high rollers they're not.

The title of the thread is too many people are dependent on solvers. That's absolutely true. A ton of players who study gto

1)dont understand what live poker is about at all. They can't see the forrest for the trees.

The fun social guy who plays fast while playing reasonably well and bad players like playing with and the gto nerd who thinks he has to maximize every drop of ev on ever decision have almost zero overlap.

You mentioned Polk. I don't really like him after his endorsement of an obvious crypto scam but when you watch him play he's the rare person who both "gets it" socially with live poker and is extremely well versed in GTO.


2)are complete slaves to solver outputs they've memorized. They aren't thinkers and adapters- they're good at studying. They'll play in a manner that wins in soft games but isn't close to optimal for those games.

Obviously the top tier guys are super sharp and good at both.

If you want to call us disagreeing hitting a roadblock that's fine. Good talk either way.

No because players have different ranges. Some people open 30 percent on the button, others 25, others 100.

Some people 3 bet 10 percent of range others 5.

So the outputs for the solver complete change dependent on villain, making the solvers redundant.

And even if everyone played the same it bets, checks, folds, at various frequencies that are impossible for the human brain to remember.

this is so painfully obvious too, however a problem I see pretty often is people think they are exploiting the living **** out of those players but.. they're not

this is a misconception though, sure if you were to play GTO lines postflop vs someone who 3bets 2% instead of 9% you'll punt in various nodes, but you make it all back and more from their preflop mistakes

poker relies entirely on winning what's in the middle before you're dealt card

Yes but again the outputs are just too difficult to remember. In No-Limit Hold'em, there are 19,600 possible flops. The solver bets different amounts and checks and bets on those flops at different frequencies to keep villain guessing. Then there is a turn and a river, there are multi way pots, there are short stacks at the table, which change things again.

I actually tried playing GTO as an experiment heads up and got my ass handed to me. In the end there is nothing better than adapting to your opponent. Whoever adapts the quickest to what their opponent is doing wins.

Agree.

This is like saying that professional runners are too dependent on their running shoes.