Solvers are highly useful tools for establishing balanced approaches which will serve you well against tough opponents as you move up the stakes. Exploitative play is the tendency to deviate from balanced strategies in order to exploit weaknesses in your opponents' play, which is particularly essential against bad opponents. If you're playing lowstakes, you will need far more understanding of exploitative play than you will balanced play, as your player pool will be full of players making large errors in their own game. Playing balanced against these guys will lose you edge, and might even lose you $.
For example, your opponent is a hugely passive calling station who doesn't have a fold button. If you proceed to bluff this guy with a normal GTO-type balanced frequency of bluffs for value in a given spot, you will get called too often and lose your shirt (but not, if you have good mindset, your **** :P)
A good simple exploit vs. the above player (as a general strat) would be to rarely bluff and only when there's an obvious scare card or some other golden opportunity, and generally to play thinner for value (more marginal value bets), larger sizings for value and take pot control / showdown lines more often with very weak showdown holdings as they will v rarely bluff you when they have Q high etc. and they'll let you get to showdown. Time to print $.
This is one simple illustration of my point above. Many of my midstakes students for example spend all their time studying highstakes sickos who need really good comprehension and application of GTO, and applying it against the wrong villains. Even more so with lowstakes guys. Even in mid to higher stakes, GTO and exploitative play aren't contradictions, they go hand in hand. One is how to play balanced and be protected against exploitation, the other is how far we should (and can) deviate from these balanced lines for specific reasons vs. specific villains without running into trouble.
This is one of many things which a coach can help you get straight in short order, if they're good at what they do.
#endrant
hmu for coaching