I've been thinking about zoom poker strategy recently. I've been grinding zoom on a hudless site, and spent the first bit just learning GTO and going with that. I don't think thats wrong, but, I do think the best strategy to beating zoom on a hudless site like GG may be totally different than GTO because of the way its very difficult to get reads on people unless you have a very large sample size, and all you can really do is mark them with a color or make a note. I DO think this worth figuring out who the regs are and trying to play a more standard strategy against them. Against everyone else, i'd like to put forward an argument for some feedback.

Your stats are always the average stats for players at the tables, regardless how you play. Thus,

You should play a heavily exploitable strategy when playing zoom.
You should modify your bet sizing based on the actual hand you have.
You should frequently never bluff, or always bluff, in certain spots.
If your on GG, which shows VPIP for last 100, you should play otherwise very nitty, but disguise your nittyness by attemping to steal wider from the btn, with a smaller size. players often prefold, which makes this even better.
Because other players are likely playing a similar strategy to mine, you should aggressively 3-bet button RFIs as the SB but rarely 3bet UTG and UTG+1 raises (less than normal)
You should aim to make money value betting a nitty range post flop and make no effort to balance your value range with bluffs in many spots. Only bluff when opponent is weak, you have a draw, or both. Either way, you should be looking to bet larger than GTO optimal in most post flop spots, 75-125% pot

Am I way off the mark on this? Should I be trying to play GTO on zoom or is it safe to assume my opponents will never know my actual frequencies?

Your opponents tendencies have nothing to do with GTO. GTO won't make the most money. It isn't designed to make the most money. It's designed to make yourself unexploitable for your opponents. Of course deviating from GTO's going to be a higher ev play in a ton of situations.

What im saying is, in zoom, i think it makes sense to just always play a clearly exploitable strategy all the time since its so difficult for opponents to figure out your frequencies. This is in contast to, for example, playing tables games on a site with huds where you can in a single session play hudnreds or thousands of hands with the same people and quickly figure out waht they are doing.

For example, opening 2.3bb pre when you have a low pocket pair and 2.8bb when you don't. This may be fine on zoom but obviously not fine anywhere else since if someone figures it out they will easily outplay you

obviously this wont fly at 200NL zoom or whatever where there are only a handful of regs but seems fine for 50NL or lower

GTO should be your baseline when you have very little to no stats or reads on your opponent(s).

It's hard to exploit someone until you know how far they are deviating from equilibrium.

One thing of note: just because the player pool is doing something exploitable doesn’t mean you just do the opposite to maximally exploit them.

Good example is live poker. People bet really big on flop and turn on average. Obviously you sit there and think to yourself “well I can exploit this by folding to more flop cbets, and check raising more”.

But this doesn’t make their strategy incorrect. In fact, it’s a good way to adjust for how a lot of the live fish play: they love to peel flop bets, they love to chase draws passively, but interestingly a lot of them don’t like to make calls with marginal made hands. So sometimes the perceived way to exploit the pool is actually what you should be doing.


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I agree. Maybe to rephrase what i was saying: we should play every hand as if we are exploiting the average zoom player, and play as if we are always perceived as the average zoom player, regardless what we do.

For example, we never bluff in 200 hands. on that 201st hand, the opponent will still call us down with a bluffcatcher

this makes sense. My understanding is that the best way to exploit in zoom is just to fold more pre and find better holdings on average than our opponent and go for value, but maybe thats not actually the best way. If we rarely bluff and overwhelming go for value, the correct response from opponents would be to overfold, but they won't because they have no idea we are not bluffing much.

Correct.

Like there’s absolutely levels that can occur. But the problem is, it’s near impossible to tell what level people are on.

There’s dead giveaways of whether you’re against a fish or a reg, sure. Like if they limp or 5x from EP, you can assume fish. But that’s basically it.

So yeah, if you deviate from how the regs exploit, it’ll work great against the regs who are conditioned to exploit in a certain way. But it might not be optimal because it’s leaving $ on the table against the weak players whom they’re trying to exploit. Just because someone is exploitable, doesn’t mean they’re bad.


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i think you are forgetting the leaderboard in your basic assumptions.