Curious what everyone thinks about the state of NL'Holdem nowerdays with GTO strategies and solvers. Is Poker reaching a point where everyone will be good enough that it will no longer be profitable? Granted using solvers and understanding the solid theory behind it all is incredibly difficult so there will always remain fish. Still, I wonder for those who play poker for a living, is that option becoming more and more difficult as time goes on?

Or on the flip side, are the pros getting better and fish remaining the same. Ultimately, making the game easier to beat as long as you play in the right games.

Game is still best played with an exploitative style, since humans can't play perfect GTO.

No. There are many people who don't like learning and stubbornly refuse to improve their game. They're mostly in the live arena and will always be profitable to play against. I've seen players who haven't changed the way they play in 15 years. lol

I can't speak for pro play, as I've never played full-time to live, but I imagine anything online is going to become tougher and tougher.

More dangerous is that it (NLHE) reaches a point where it is no longer interesting. It's certainly that way for me.

I think there'll always be plenty of fish and soft games just maybe not at the online level some players play at. The higher the level the less fish I think you'll likely find.

Using myself as an example....just before the Moneymaker poker boom I started and played at 50nl on both UB and Pokerstars. It was a cake walk and pretty easy with just reading a few good books from back in that time. Then over the years became more of a MTT player got away from mostly cash.

Fast forward to Oct 2022 and I've comeback to cash with a challenge to myself of starting at 2nl and working my way up hopefully to 50nl where I was before. So far I don't think it'll be that much of a challenge to reach 50nl.......the biggest challenge for me will be getting the volume in as a rec player with job that takes 70 hours a week and a family. I think the games and tables are still plenty soft with fish. I do think though the number of fish and terrible players is down. So in that sense the overall talent level has improved as over the years most of the worst of the worst have dropped out. At least at the micro rec player levels.

With all that said today's online 2nl play pretty much exactly like Pokerstar's play money tables from 20+ years ago. Make standard preflop raise get 4-5 callers in 80+% of the hands . As I move up in stakes though I expect this to change hopefully pretty quick as I really enjoyed how 50nl played back in the day(standard preflop raise 1 maybe 3 callers).

I think sixfour posts an interesting question though. Will NLH keep remaining interesting for the majority.....for me it still is so I right now I hope so but I could see a time it might not be interesting to the vast majority.



Cheers!!!

GTO is the way of the future however exploitative poker will always come into play especially against weaker villains

WHY DOES POKER NEED TO BE PROFITABLE? What other game in the casino is profitable in the long run?

comparing poker to other casino games is lol

I've heard it said that even when moving up highstakes there is still alot of innovation that goes into the game. The game is still changing. They still have not really gotten into solving multiway situations and other things too. I wouldn't be surprised if a situation that they say was solved as of right now, might be looked as outdated later on.