GTO players need a bigger bankroll
Contrary to popular opinion, GTO players reduce their edge and as such need bigger bankrolls than exploitative players.
My new book on GTO with Dara O'Kearney is almost done and, once again, I have one of the more interesting, easily digestible lessons from it.
One of the big misconceptions about GTO is that it is the most profitable way to play. It is actually just a way to play to reduce your chances of being exploited. A good exploitative player will always make more than a good GTO player at a certain stake, but the benefit of GTO is you can take it to any table and be a winner.
With that in mind, a consideration when adopting a GTO strategy is that you need a bigger bankroll to do so. You cap your potential winrate when you do not exploit your opponents, meaning that you need a bigger buffer against variance.
As a ballpark figure let's say a GTO player has a capped 20% edge in tournaments, even against weak players. In soft MTTs a good player who diverges can have up to a 100% ROI and in high stakes games a good exploitative player might have a 30% edge.
You can run sims to see the sort of bankroll you would need for the two styles for free at PrimeDope.com. In this sim we looked at $50 MTTs with 300 runners on average and 40 places paid. This is a sample of 20 runs a player with a 20% ROI might have:
Over 10,000 MTTs this player would win $18,498 in the worst case and $177,285 in the best case scenario. Their risk of ruin was 1% and their required bankroll would be $14,590.
A good exploitative player with a 50% ROI would fare much better:
This player would make at least $165,258 and as much as $339,235. Their risk of ruin is also 1% and their required bankroll is $5,595.
With much better prospects for the exploitative player, why even bother playing GTO? GTO is best used against tough players and unknowns, against really bad players you still want to diverge. The other reason to play GTO is because you can increase your tables and stakes without, in theory, seeing a big drop in your winrate.
In theory that $50 GTO player with the 20% ROI could move up to $500 games and see no drop in their winrate. We ran a sim for those games and the worst run saw that player make $226,440 and the best run they made $1,870,674 over 10,000 games. Their required bankroll was $154,137.
Let’s say our $50 exploit player moved to $500 games. Their winrate would surely drop down and most likely it would go under the 20% of the GTO player. When we ran a sim for this the player ended up down $326,066 in one of the examples and had a best result of $1,196,485.
If nothing else learning GTO is a good way to brush up on the fundamentals in poker, but it has the potential to scale up tremendously if you develop a solid understanding of it.
Do you study GTO? Let us know in the comments:
