At what stakes should you study GTO?

Dara O'Kearney will probably surprise you about how soon you should be switching your study to Game Theory Optimal play.

I wrote last week about the way GTO might help your mindset and today I wanted to give you a sense of the poker landscape and at what stakes GTO starts to become a thing. Even if you play super soft games, studying GTO will help you move up stakes quicker and play well against good players.

Of course it depends where you play, if you play 200NL on Unibet Poker right now you can probably get away with a very exploitative style, but 200NL Zoom at PokerStars might genuinely be one of the toughest games in the world.

Play any $25,000 High Roller and you can expect 95% of the field to be well versed in GTO, but play the $25,000 PSPC which will have around 300 amateur players in it, and you would be burning money not to play exploitative. A $2/$5 game at the Venetian is going to be much tougher than a $2/$5 game at the Flamingo, and so on.

In the live arena I would say that any tournament with a $1,000 buy-in or above is going to have enough solid regulars that playing a GTO style has its benefits. Online I would say from the $50 buy-in level and above the same is true.

In cash you should start now

If you play online cash, I would make the bold claim that you are best off studying GTO even at the micro stakes, it has become almost essential now. In cash games it is much easier to develop pattern recognition for common spots because they are all at 100 big blinds effective, so GTO is much easier to apply. You will also encounter more good regulars in cash games, even if they are playing across more tables.

Also in cash games the frequency with which you come across the same regulars is much more significant. You will more often face regulars and if it is a site with HUDs, you really want to avoid the exploit/counter exploit strategy with another good player. Stick to GTO to make your decisions easier and more streamlined.

The best approach will always be to have both GTO and exploit in your arsenal. If you played GTO in the WSOP Main Event on Day 1, when there is so much value out there, you will be putting yourself at a massive opportunity cost. Play super exploitative on Day 5 of the Main Event and you might get crushed. The importance is knowing both and when to switch between the two.

Dara O'Kearney's new book Endgame Poker Strategy: The ICM Book is out now.