Let's not forget op might be a troll

Didn't read all posts, but this is just so wrong.

We don't want to make all hands in V's range indifferent.



edit: Read rest of the posts and came to the conclusion that OP is either trolling or ******.

You don't get it!

The problem is that GTO and Hold'em Strategy gets mixed up. You can talk a lot about GTO, but once you try to apply it to Hold'em it fails, because the models are too simplified. The real solution is still unknown!

There is a correlation between GTO in Poker and GTO in Finance. There you also have people who think they can predict the market based on their funny little models. They charge a lot of money for this from their customers and we all know how it turns out in the end.

That being said, my intention was to show where the profit of GTO comes from. It is a strategy that will reduce the cost of opportunity - in the optimal case - to zero. You just sit there and wait for someone to hopefully make a mistake. If nobody makes mistakes, you win nothing. In fact you go bust to the rake and even without a rake you will eventually go bust, because of Gambler's Ruin. Bankroll management is just another myth. You can just choose your chance of going broke, but it will never be zero.

Don't forget, the most stable results for all of these "GTO-experts" come from booksales.

I enjoyed reading this thread, especially since I know basically nothing about GTO play. But OP came off as a little irritated and unpleasant and im not sure how that helps prove anything, infact i think you articulated youre thoughts well but the delivery was a little under handed and rude tbh. But thanks for the discussion. Bravo Foucault for keeping calm through this tennis match on GTO play.

He had no other option than staying calm about it, because he was using an example in his article for play on the button which proves nothing.

Every situation in Poker can come up with you as player A or as player B and it happens randomly. What you win as player A with perfect play in that spot is the exact same amount that you lose as player B in the very same spot. The game is simply symmetrical. After I exposed this flaw in my initial posting, any further comment by him was just -EV. The nice thing is that I discovered something during the process that wasn't clear to me beforehand and that is where the money that GTO can(!) win actually comes from.

Other than that I don't care. On such topics etiquette doesn't matter, only the truth matters. I don't know the guy, I will never meet him and frankly speaking I don't give a damn about him and I am sure that he thinks the same about me.

If all players play GTO, it cannot be GTO anymore, because they would cancel eachother out? isn't that the main output of his thought? So in other regards, when you know a player play GTO, it should be best GTO to not play GTO towards him?

If your opponent even plays remotely close to GTO, some sort of approximation for instance, then you shouldn't play at all, because your theoretical edge with perfect play would be too small to overcome the rake.

That's also the reason why the game dries out on all levels, not only the expert-level. It's the rake that kills the game. All that money on Isai Scheinberg's bank account has to come from somewhere after all.

GTO strategies are also known as "equilibrium strategies" because when both players are playing them, there is no way for one player to unilaterally improve his expectation. In other words, you can't just change it up and start beating your opponent if he is playing perfectly.

The point of my article is that an equilibrium strategy can profit from mistakes an opponent makes when he is not playing an equilibrium strategy, even without knowing what those mistakes are or adapting to actively exploit them (in which case you would not be playing an equilibrium strategy anymore).

The good news is that we are a long way from knowing what a perfect strategy for a game as complex as NLHE looks like. The bad news is that we're close enough that it's hard for good players to find edges against each other large enough to overcome rake.

On this point, Shandra is correct: between two tough players who know enough to approximate a GTO strategy, only the house wins.

So many scientists and so little science.

Never seen such a big thread of which there is such little substance.

It's no secret that poker books, poker coaching, and other online pamphlets or what have you... are all just snake oil. Once you get a fundamental understanding of Hold'em, there are not many places to go. You can do all the math you need to do to figure out whatever you need to figure out. Then you can apply simple ideas to the situation and find out if you were correct in doing what you were doing.

Take a 3 hour primer on wikipedia about probability and you have all the tools you need to understand everything about the game.

So many assumptions need to take place for something like GTO to even work- and our brains are not a continual memory-bank of spreadsheets that crunch whether or not we should fold 40%, call 40% or raise 20% in this situation. Not to mention- how much do we raise when we raise? There are so many things that are just left out in every reading of nash-style play that it just doesn't make sense to think about.

For that reason, I'm bored of this thread. I'm out. *mic drop*

In what way are books, coaching, and what not snake oil? We've been playing chess for hundreds of years and there are still things to be learned and studied and passed down. You believe that a game that is close to chess in it's strategic depth is able to be mastered so quickly?

What assumptions need to be made? (Note: I don't pretend to come close to knowing or understand GTO. But I do understand that a game so steeped in math would have a math-based strategy at it's core)

No one is saying "everyone should master GTO or it's approximations". There are plenty of people who can focus solely on exploiting opponent errors and make great money. (though, I would argue that you can't define an error unless you can define what is correct.)

Here's an analogy:
Paul McCartney has always refused to study music theory, because he fears it will take away his creativity. Does that mean he doesn't utilize it every time he writes/plays music? No. He just doesn't focus on learning it. Every time you sit down to play and you play "better" than your opponent you are utilizing the concepts of GTO (if only to capitalize on villains blunders.)

There are maybe 2 or 3 poker books that I think sum up the entirety of thought as far as value in Hold'em goes. Kill Phil (maybe the 2nd too) for tournaments, NLHETAP, and applications of NLHE. Those 3 books enable you to understand everything you need to know to beat the games today. Anything more than that is just garbage. I also read a chapter from a full tilt book that was written by Chris Ferguson, and another thing written by Howard Lederer about leverage. THAT'S IT. In all my years of reading possibly a hundred books- they were all trash except for those few. Those few say everything you need to know.

Coaching is really important if you're not understanding fundamentals. If you don't know how to review your play, or make adjustments. If you're having issues with tilt, or clouding your judgment with emotion... or just some stupid leak that everyone has (for example, playing your roadie... Q4os because hey- it's your roadie!). Coaches can get all those bad habits out of you. But beyond that, they're not going to be able to help you learn any special secret. They might recognize certain players at a certain limit doing certain things that MIGHT reflect how you should react moreso than you've been doing.

In a coaching session, when they tell you to do something in a live situation... if it works out they take all the praise and if it doesn't they say, "that's not usually going to happen." It's up to you whether or not you believe them... and once again, you're left to your own devices. You have to put in the time to research the play and analyze what's going on.

Coaches can't help me anymore. I'm "there." They might be able to analyze my hand histories better... or teach me about PT4 functionality more... but other than that- they're not going to be telling me about anything I don't already know.

Matt Bolt is one of my favorite online players of all time. Go look up his videos. The simplicity he plays with is bar none. He does strange things sometimes, but his rationality for doing them always makes sense. He also publishes videos where villains show up with unlikely holdings... and I doubt he cherry picks his material.

That being said... nothing he says is really that crazy. It's no conclusion you couldn't have gotten to by yourself. He's not a brainiac. He might not have immense success- but he's in the tops.

Think about it like this... if you had a secret that earned you millions of dollars- would you share it for less than unlimited money? You wouldn't. The promises of like, "THIS POKER BOOK WILL REVOLUTIONIZE THE WAY YOU LOOK AT THE GAME" or that guy that was selling his .pdf for like $300... that stuff makes me laugh. Mersenneary's HU article is all you need to know to start crushing HU matches- and it's free. Nobody with secrets is hiding them anymore. It's all out. Supersystems was the first big outter of secrets (even though it's been criticized to hell and back)

None of this involves GTO playing. The idea that I raise into you and you draw up a mental matrix in your mind and click call because you should be calling 32% of the time in this situation... that's ludicrous. I don't think anyone or their dog could possibly think or play like that, and to try and use your brain on that level would involve such a high intellect that I doubt you'd waste it on poker.

So yea, that's why I don't like the whole nash equilibrium thing.

I have found that there is little purpose in arguing for/against opinion. I don't say that to be snide. I appreciate your response. And I learned about an article I need to read. So thank you for that.

I agree that there is a lot of BS in book advertising. But, I don't think that means that all books are garbage. I've read quite a bit about the game, have a solid foundation (I think) and I still come out of each read of things with new thoughts and info. I picked up Miller's "The Course" (I know, a lot 2P2ers hate miller, I don't) and even though it's geared towards beginners, it showed me things I hadn't seen or considered before. So, I appreciate that. Was it the one book that is going to make me crush my games? Nope. But it added to my thought process and that's important.

And I think that once you get a solid understanding of GTO (which I don't have) it becomes a lot like simple pot odds analysis and hand rankings. You don't really have to pull up matrixes anymore. You just say "oh, I have these pot odds and this is my draw...ok, call".

But, again. Thank you for your response.

**edit** is this the article you were talking about?

Nobody said that all books are garbage. They just lose most of their practical value as soon as the information becomes available to everyone.

In a game where you and all the other players base their strategy on the very same book, you just have to take a step back and reconsider what you are actually doing there. It gets even more absurd when the title of the book contains the word "winning".

There is an analogy in chess. When you see a book with the title "Winning with ..." and it is a repertoire book for black, then you should think twice. If you still bought it and an expert is willing to play one of the recommended variations with you, then I can already predict the outcome.

...yep

So what poker books would you say are not garbage?

Super System 2

Really? I find that book to be garbage.

the ones I stated

Don't put me on the spot on this one

I like a very old book written buy a guy named Nesmith Ankeny "Poker Strategy: Winning with Game Theory", even though it contains the word "winning". Unfortunately it's on 5-Card-Draw, but it is still the only book on the market that actually attempts to provide a real GTO-based strategy.

For the record: When I made the statement above, I forgot about the books on NL push/fold-systems. That's also a GTO-based strategy of course.

Hi Andrew, just doing some 2p2 stalking after I found you in the Assani thread you linked to from your podcast page.

A better analogy than Paper, Scissors, Stone would be HU "guess the number of sweets (candies) in the jar". I would explain it to people like this:

If it is possible for a professional GTNOSITJ player to know that the correct number of sweets in a given jar is somewhere between 400 and 500, and if he knows he is against another professional he will guess the GTO 450, probably the other expert will do the same or close and it's a push or they both win 50% of the time.

An unknown amateur GTNOSITJ player may come along and have an unknown tendency to guess a lower number. He might say 410, and our professional wins 70% of the time even though he doesn't deviate from the GTO strategy. This is known as passive exploitation.

If our professional becomes aware of this tendency he may then try to actively exploit it by also guessing a low number, but not as low as the amateur, so if he guess 420 and the amateur guesses 410, the professional wins 85% of the time. This is active exploitation. If amateurs tend to always guess too low, then playing this kind of strategy against an unknown GTNOSITJ fish would be active exploitation against player pool tendencies.

The Paper, Scissors, Stone analogy misses out the possibility for passive exploitation.

...

The AKQ game is good, but if you sit and solve the AKQJT98765432 game in Excel, there are "sometimes" bluffs and "always" bluffs, "sometimes" value bets and "always" value bets as well as "sometimes" calls and "always" calls. If Villain does not make the correct "always" moves he gives up value to you. It's only the few hands in the game with mixed strategies where you are indifferent. That's more like real poker.

Well said. Please delete before 2p2 realizes they should have you writing for the magazine instead of me.

Thanks. Not sure they want NL10 players writing for them though.

There is one place I would say GTO is really not helpful, at least at my stakes against unknowns. Rather than randomising a section of the calling range by blockers, it's usually much better just to call the top X%, because it quite often happens that someone bets some of the "never" bet hands in the middle, and you definitely want to be getting full value when that happens even if that means you are giving up a little against the very strongest (but unknown) players.

As editor of the Magazine, I can say that's not relevant.

As long as you're writing about a topic you know and write the article well, any submission by you would be seriously considered.

I've never had an author focus of very small stakes games like NL10. So, that would be something new.

Given that the bulk of online traffic is at the micros and many players seem to get stuck there I would expect there to be a relatively large readership for content that focused on 50nl and below.