yeah I don;t think you have a clue what you are saying with the last few posts. But I don't really want to keep explaining fully since it seem kind of -ev over my time. Also on a side note I am actually depress just got a email back rejecting my life term insurance policy of 1 million. REASON FOR DECLINE: Advised to reduce alcohol use, No US based health care, undetermined chest XRAY, current occupation and income along with elevated liver function lab results.

Pre Black Friday, most 40/80 lhe pros couldn’t beat small stakes online games. I imagine that gap has widened.


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Thanks. That would be my expectation.

Part of the motivation of my long post about goals above was to sniff out if I'm odd man out in terms of what I hope to get out of this forum. I see a lot of 20/40 and 40/80 live hands here which I find really high value. It's less directly relevant why an online player thinks it's dumb to depart from GTO but I can possibly learn a lot from that discussion too.

Studying to crush live games and studying GTO play might be the same thing, and in any event certainly overlap.

Yep. The toughest game I regularly played in was 2/4 full ring LHE on Stars pre-BF. You had to game and seat select rigorously and there were still always players on the table who were math geniuses and very tough to play against. There is no live game I have ever played in regularly that compares in any way to that level of difficulty.

I would say that a typical 20/40 or 25/50 game in LA is the equivalent of 10c/25c on Stars pre-BF, and a typical 8/16 game is like 5c/10c. And sometimes live games, even yellow/red chip live games, are like 2c/4c.

There are a handful of people in town who played online, did a ton of math, have incredible discipline, and are just amazing live. Just a handful. Many people who are probably winning live players wouldn't have been able to beat 50c/1 online.

This might be true against winning players or otherwise more observant/erratic than usual fish, but it's an absurd claim to make if you're playing against legit fish who make the same big mistakes over and over.

Definitely overlap. I don't think they coincide. "Identifying and adapting to systematic errors that live midstakes players make" is an extremely valuable subdiscipline for me that's almost worthless if your goal is to beat online $50/100 unless a bad player happens to come along in that game.

But thinking hard about the GTO absolutely helps with that, no disputing that.

The biggest edges in good live games with multiple players seeing flops come from exploitive strategies. GTO doesn't even exist in these spots unless you define it as losing the least amount possible to colluding opponents, which of course is silly.

My bet is that there is a huge convergence between what good players who study GTO do and what good players who don't study GTO do when playing against the absolute biggest fish, only because at some point the proper exploitative action becomes truly obvious (e.g., "they only bet the river when they have it").

But I would also bet that against opponents who are not complete idiots but simply have a lot of leaks (say, opponents who play decently well post-flop but who are impatient / undisciplined and play way too many hands pre-flop, or opponents who play a decent range but pay off a bit too much on the river), the people who use the solvers or do the GTO math and then try to mathematically make the proper exploitative adjustments are probably making much more money than those of us who just approach the game by feel or make an estimate of the opponent's range and try to exploit that way.

I think the problem may be more that his English just isn't good enough to explain his likely extensive poker knowledge. But as I told you previously, I have a low tolerance for understanding poor grammar.

I think it's self-evident that people who study to gain as complete an understanding of the game as possible are going to make the most money.

But understanding/memorizing as much of the GTO strategy as possible isn't necessarily going to have better returns than learning to identify common leaks and studying the most profitable ways to exploit them.

Yes, the best players will have a strong understanding of GTO strategy in most spots they'll encounter, but the guy who knows GTO play well enough to make the "correct" play 99% of the time isn't likely going to win more than the guy who knows the GTO play 95% of the time but is better at exploiting leaks.

One item that's particularly neglected in this discussion IMO is a theory of how real human beings who play slightly suboptimally, not robots, react to our attempts to exploit them. E.g. my rock-paper-scissors example above.

We discover an opponent's leak. We get out of line to exploit it, but if we get too far out of line, the opponent will catch on and counteradjust. So instead we get a little bit out of line and keep shearing the proverbial sheep. How long can we do this before they catch on? How exploitative can we be?

If someone's theorized about this please point me there.

For the most part I think this really only comes into play significantly when we're bluffing highly bluffable players. When you're caught bluffing it's easy for even a bad player to make an adjustment so it's probably better to drop some of the marginal bluffs and stick to spots where the bluff is highly likely to work. The best example imo is against someone who likes to bet/fold the river far too much... you might be able to blindly raise any of their river bets profitably, but if you get caught even once that goose is cooked.

If we're calling down light against habitual bluffers it might make sense to drop a few combos where you barely have the odds to call but don't beat all bluffs, cuz even a fish can adjust to someone who's known to call down with queen high.

Quoted for saying what i wanted to say better than i could.

The reason the phrase "not letting the quest for GTO distract me from optimizing" tilts me is not because I pick one side or the other in the aim-for-optimal-play versus aim-for-maximal-exploitation, but because of the words involved.

If we are putting aside striving to play optimally and doing and playing another way instead, our reason for doing it may be a very good one, even a compelling one. But to do this is to do something different from optimizing our play.

The phrase in effect says, "instead of optimizing my play I am optimizing my play." It's nonsense.

In a context where we are talking at least part of the time about game-theory optimal play, it is misleading and confusing to use the words "optimum," "optimize," or "optimal" to mean something other than their game-theoretical meanings.

Nah, GTO just isn't optimal against imperfect opponents. Optimal isn't the same as GTO. Not sure why that should bother anyone.

It's also impossible to play GTO live where you give away information involuntarily.

yeah there's spots that i need to pause to think and those spots shrink/cap my range. unless of course, you don't have a problem with hollywooding in limit poker, but be prepared to piss a lot of people off. not saying i always just snap raise with the nuts hu, but i know not to go beyond 2.5 seconds.

Look at the bright side - you won't have to worry about your wife knocking you off.

In honor of the end of my summer in Vegas here are 4 of my favorite hands from tournaments this year:

6max lhe day 2: reg who I have played hundreds hours with and goes for thin bet/folds on the river opens btn. I 3b QQ bb he calls. Flop K84cc. Bet raise call. Turn Jd chk bet call. River As I xr and he tank folds.

1500 lhe also day 2. Pro from la is all in for less in the bb. I open KdQh in the hj. Solid co 3b I call. Flop AdTc2d. I xr he calls turn 9s I bet he folds. I beat K3s to scoop.

1500 2-7. Short stack opens in co. I 3b 245 otb he calls. 1-2. I catch 5K. Chk chk. I catch 45. He bets I call. He has 1 bet behind. Pat-pat. He chk folds.

2500 mixed td

Utg opens. I 3b 2457K in co Randy Ohel calls button old guy calls 2-1-2 I catch a 4 chk bet raise call call 2-1-1. I catch a 4 chk chk bet fold call 1-pat. I catch a 5 and bet. He folds.

Even though I think you're being a bit haughty and off target here (clearly the games you play in and the games I play in have very different opponents so your assessment of my reasoning isn't really all that relevant to beating live 20/40 and 40/80 LHE)...

I am really sincerely sorry to hear about these health issues. The US health care system is enough to depress all of us. I take this post to mean you're in the US, not sure. It's also not clear to me if you mean literal diagnosed depression, but if so, I just want to affirm--mental health issues are no joke. Society stigmatizes them but that's because society is dumb.

But you're obviously very smart and you can pull through this. I pray for all the best and wish you well in overcoming this.

vnh this one's sexy vs described opp

Way sexier is Lhe super pro at the table immediately asked OTR if he had Queens.

The guy who folded did? Or someone watching the hand?

An observing player at the table. Yip yip yip

Seems foolish to pretty much straight up tell the guy everyone thinks he folds to river raises too much