Myths about GTO

We have an exclusive excerpt from Dara O'Kearney and Barry Carter's new book GTO Poker Simplified.

This is an exclusive excerpt from Barry Carter and Dara O'Kearney's new book GTO Poker Simplified.

One of the reasons some people struggle to pick up GTO is less about how difficult it is and more about some quite bad optics it has received in some corners of poker. There is new lingo and technology that comes with GTO, and some of its early adopters are unsurprisingly the best players in the world, so there is little wonder there seems to be a much bigger barrier to entry than there actually is.

It is true that there are some initial teething periods when it comes to learning GTO and a lot of that is because it involves a lot of unlearning of previously unquestioned poker wisdom. A good way to get up to speed on GTO is to address some of the most commonly held myths about Game Theory Optimal poker.

Myth 1: GTO is the perfect way to play poker

This is one of those misconceptions that advocates of GTO fall into and that it is the only ‘correct’ way to play the game. It isn’t. GTO is simply a strategy to avoid being exploited in poker. If you can play unexploitable poker then by default you will make money whenever your opponent plays in an exploitable style, which will be often because everybody has aspects to their game that can be exploited.

GTO is never the most profitable way to play poker. If your opponent is playing an exploitable style then you will make the most money by counter-exploiting them. The problem there is that you leave yourself open to being counter exploited too.

GTO is never the ‘best’ way to play in any single hand but as an overall strategy it will prove to be profitable, whether you are playing $1 MTTs or $100,000 Super High Rollers. While some people are evangelical about GTO, all the best players diverge from it when a particularly fishy opponent sits down.

There is also a belief that solvers like PIOSolver give you the definitive ‘right’ answer for any spot, which is wrong. A solver output is only as good as the assumptions you punch into it. When you ‘solve’ a hand you state the range you believe you and your opponent would have as well as the bet sizes you believe each of you would use in similar spots. There is no way you can perfectly assume either of these things and if you get either wrong your solve will be flawed, get them dramatically wrong and the solve will be useless. Therefore solvers are only as good as the person who uses them.

Myth 2: GTO is only useful at the high stakes

Playing purely GTO against a fish is not the best strategy. If you are up against a calling station making a small river bet with the nuts to protect your small bet range is burning money. When you know you are up against a bad player you should adjust to exploit them. When you are playing against good players or unknowns, your best strategy is to play as close to GTO as possible. You don’t make your money against good players anyway so it is best to avoid exploitation and look to make your money from the weak players. When a player is unknown, GTO is the best way to proceed with caution until you learn more about them.

Good players understand this, but this does not mean that GTO is useless against bad players. We expect the core audience of our book to be lower stakes players who don’t have to worry about facing GTO regulars. There are, however, many lessons from the world of GTO that are useful even if you are playing in soft games. The best hands to bluff with, the best hands to bluffcatch with, the right bet size for dry and wet flops, how to play against different range types, when to overbet and how to use blockers are just some of the lessons you can take to weak games as well as nosebleed tables.

Myth 3: GTO is just breakeven poker

Those who understand that GTO is about not being exploited sometimes mistake it therefore for playing for a stalemate. It is true that if you played perfect GTO poker against another player who is also playing perfect GTO poker, you would, over a big enough sample, breakeven.

In reality nobody is even close to playing perfect GTO poker but if you can improve your game using GTO principles your earn rate will increase, and the gains will scale up as you climb the stakes.

Myth 4: GTO is killing poker

Those who think GTO is boring or perfect therefore also go on to believe that it is killing the game. Just in the way that people felt that HUDs were killing poker, just in the way they thought big rakeback deals were killing poker, just like prior to that online poker was killing poker and before that they felt hole card cameras were killing the game.

A more insipid myth you see from the same detractors of GTO is that it is such an edge, it is actually a form of cheating. This is a particularly backwards way of thinking about the game, which if you take to its natural conclusion means that any form of poker study is cheating.

It is true that poker faces a form of cheating related to GTO in the form of RTA software. Contrary to what some may think, there isn’t a solver on the planet that can calculate how to play a hand in the time it takes to play a hand. What RTA software does is access a database of previously solved hands, if a similar one is in the database it is used for comparison. If the opponent plays differently from the assumptions an RTA has made, then that could render a real time solver useless anyway.

Do not get me wrong, the threat of RTAs is nothing to play down and all the reputable poker rooms are working hard to tackle it. But learning GTO principles and applying it to your game is not cheating and in fact something which should be applauded.

Myth 5: You need to be a genius to do it

The final myth is perhaps what puts off people from even starting to learn GTO and it is why its detractors deflect by suggesting it is cheating or kills the game. Because the early adopters of GTO are some of the best players in the world and invariably quite tech savvy, it can be alienating. It is also true that the early GTO software like PIOSolver comes with a bit of a learning curve. It is quite hard to understand a PIOSolver output at first, knowing what to input isn’t easy and even running it is time consuming.

This is an excerpt from GTO Poker Simplified by Barry Carter and Dara O'Kearney, which is out now. 

UK Paperback l UK Kindle l US Paperback l US Kindle