Will Tipton: Breakthrough in GTO approximation theory
Our resident world class poker player, HUSNG.com coach and theoretician is back to help you improve the precision of your GTO approach.
Most poker theoreticans have given up when it comes to finding exact GTO solutions. Real GTO is an incredibly strong concept, but at the same time very hard to use in practice. Some people think about GTO as the pink unicorn at the end of the rainbow. Something that does exist, but isn't attainable with our limited brain power.
However, approximating GTO solutions is the way to go when you want to make your game plan as good as it can be.
World class poker player and theoretician follows this road and has come up with an incredible breakthrough on precision when making these approximations, and even more crucially on usability level.
Conqeuring precision
To understand his theory though, we have to understand what poker professionals do today to approximate GTO solutions. For example:
Hero bets the flop and wants to know the EV if he got called by his opponent. Today we start with the GTO equitation EV(Flop) = EV(Turn) – Bet and approximate EV(Turn) with R*Equity*Pot.
R is the realisation factor and tells us what our equity is worth in a game with more decisions to come. To find R professionals looked into large databases and these days we have a good understanding if R is around 0.5, 0.7 or 1.2 in a given situation.
But here it stops and most people start to think more with words and simple logic than with actual calculations. It goes something like the following:
- Villain has low barrelling frequencies. My weak showdown value hands get better: R + 0.1
- Villain tends to fold too often with ace high against pot bets on the river. I can realise more equity with my air hands here: R + 0.3
- Villain tends to bluff catch too much. My air hands decrease in value: R = 0.1. Likewise my medium value hands become more valuable R +0.4
This approach is very powerful to find blunders in a strategy and gives us an idea of what might be OK or very hard to exploit, but it is also a dead end if we want to make our game more precise.
That's when Will Tipton comes to the rescue with this video. Instead of R he uses CF (the capture pot factor) in the following equitation: EV(checking) = S + CF * P, where S is the stacks behind. With this approach he was able to calculate a precise mapping for given board textures and equity:
In this video, Will also offers concrete formulas for calculating our Turn EV based on our equity in a given situation.
Will Tipton is a coach at HUSNG.com
If you like what you see and you want to learn more about Will Tipton, we recommend the following:
- His first PS.com video demonstrating how to use distribution graphs
- Expert No Limit Hold'em Video Pack: A special deal to buy supplementary videos specifically designed to further the understanding of No Limit players.
- Will Tipton Video Pack 2 - Solving Poker: Not only does this package improve your poker game, it will also teach you how to program in Python, meaning you can create your own programmes to improve future poker study.
