10 Jan 2025 Intermediate This material is for medium-skilled players A-game blockers discipline GTO moving up stakes Why is it that, despite the rise of powerful tools like solvers and GTO Wizard AI, we have seen the average rate of professionals slowly decline over the last few years? I will explain the answer to this question by showing you guys the 5 bad habits players start to develop when studying solvers and GTO strategies, so you can stop the decline, rise upwards and make more money. Let's go! GTO Bad Habit #1: Defensive Play So the first thing is being stuck in defense, or playing not to lose instead of playing to win. When we open the solver, we see a GTO strategy: It provides a framework for unexploitable play by balancing optimally, which makes it unbeatable regardless of your opponent's strategy. Its goal is not to win the most amount of money possible, but instead play a defensive strategy designed not to lose. Not losing is a great place to start just in case if you are a losing player. However, it is likely that your goal is to make the most amount of money possible, which happens to not be the objective of the model you've been studying. While there are benefits in taking a more defensive approach when playing versus tougher opponents or in difficult notes, in order to boost your winnings you must evolve towards a more offensive strategy to take advantage of the numerous opportunities that are available to you at the poker tables. GTO Bad Habit #2: Trying to Copy GTO Trying to copy GTO strategies instead of learning poker theory. As we concluded, GTO's goal is not to lose, while we are more interested in making the most amount of money possible. Now, this does not mean we should all go and cancel our GTO Wizard or other similar poker software subscriptions, but rather that we need to shift our focus and adjust what we aim to learn from the solvers. As when we stop trying to memorize and mimic the solver, and look beyond the frequencies and range constructions of the GTO model, we begin noticing returning trends and patterns of play. For example: In which circumstances we usually increase or decrease our bet sizing or bet frequency; What certain hand classes achieve in commonly used lines; How does it make EV. Understanding these drivers will help eliminate fundamental flaws in your approach to the game, help you make better decisions even if you are a more exploitative player. Because theory, unlike GTO strategies, offers more flexibility, which allows you to adapt and maneuver and apply it in various ways and situations. GTO Bad Habit #3: Rigid Thinking In the «Solverland» players have full information about the other strategy. This means that it has to construct its ranges in a way that makes its opponent indifferent. Meaning that for many hands in your range, there is no clear higher EV decision to be made. In other words, you are being put in a tough spot because no action is clearly better than the other. The solver has to do this because his opponent is also playing perfectly. Therefore, any imbalance in its strategy would have direct and expensive consequences. However, in the real world, these consequences don't exist. As most players are too preoccupied with their own ranges and frequencies, trying to mimic solver strategies. They aren't focused on your range. And even if they are aware of it, they won't be able to execute the same counter-strategy a solver would in a game. So the truth is: you don't have to do anything. Instead, we must focus on what we can do, based on the incentives given by our opponent, and whether the play we are considering making will be plus EV in this situation. Let's say we face a triple barrel on the river holding a bluff catcher. How do we decide if we should call here: If you think you're going to have to call this hand a certain percentage of the time, you're implying that either your opponent is playing a perfectly balanced strategy or that you are able to execute a perfect GTO strategy, which in both cases is very unlikely. When deciding if we should pull the trigger around a bluff, or make the call on the river, don't focus on whether we have to call or bluff our hand a certain percentage of the time for the sake of trying to be GTO. Instead, focus on if we can make a plus a fee bluff or call in that specific spot. So in case we are considering a bluff, is it likely that your opponent is going to fold enough? Or in our bluff catch situation, is this spot sensitive to being over or under bluffed? As these are the factors that will truly have an impact on your win rate. GTO Bad Habit #4: Focusing Only On Yourself Bad habit number four is thinking about your range and frequencies instead of your opponent's range and tendencies. Shifting from «have to» to «can I» is part of evolving from a defensive to offensive thinking framework. We must stop thinking in threats, and instead look for opportunities given by our opponents that allow us to make higher EV decisions. Instead of focusing solely on your own cards' range and tendencies, lift your head from the table and start looking at those of your opponents. You'll start to notice that most of the time, they are not playing a strategy so GTO that they make your decisions indifferent. Instead, they have tendencies and give away information that incentivizes us to take one action more often than the other. If we go back to the key poker theoretical concepts a solver can teach us, it is that equity and frequencies are the main driver of strategy. Every human opponent has difficulty maintaining the exact frequencies and range construction of a solver. And since their range construction determines our equity, and equity is the main driver of strategy, our main objective should be to figure out what our opponent has and what is up to. As this information allows us to make higher EV decisions and deploy more effective strategies against them. GTO Bad Habit #5: Randomising Everything If we look at a GTO flop c-bet strategy, we see the solver mixing a lot of hands: This mixing means that both lines are generating the same EV. It can't play its hand at a full frequency as this would either over or undershoot the appropriate frequency for the situation he is in. It also can't be simplified by always betting this hand and never a similar hand in this category as the player knows his range and this would make his strategy very predictable and exploitable. When we try to copy GTO strategies and start mixing combos simply because the solver does so, many things can go wrong, with the most significant error being not understanding how EV is generated in both lines taken. The actual EV of the hand, and therefore its indifference, is determined by how you execute and how your opponent responds in both lines being mixed. Whichever line you understand fully and can execute best, or in which you induce the most mistakes from your opponent, will be the highest EV line. Let’s take this turn spot for example: We can either bet or check our hand in theory. However, after we check, we must now raise our hand versus a river bet at a high frequency. But if we instead check turn and fold the river, the turn would no longer be indifferent and betting would be the highest EV strategy. What often happens is that players shoot randomizing hands without understanding its incentives in both lines. They then end up clueless on where they are at the hand on later streets, leading to more randomizing end mistakes as they fail to plan ahead. Bonus GTO Bad Habit: Blocker Fetish When we are stuck in defensive poker, have to think and fail to plan our hands ahead to figure out how to best generate EV, our decision making process becomes a mess. We then start looking for any type of handhold to help us make a decision, and the most common handhold is blockers. Since solver strategies are perfect, the only way we can influence our opponent's frequencies and gain the EV needed to make something plus EV, is through the impact of card removal, aka blocking or unblocking call or folding ranges. While it's true that blocking or unblocking increases and decreases the chances of something happening, in most real world situations, this alone is not the difference between a play being plus or minus EV, but instead it will only enhance or decrease the EV further. Let’s take the following example: We are on the river and deciding on whether we should bluff our hand after having bet the flop and turn goes check check. We see that the solver clearly has a preference for bluffs that are not blocking the folding range. While it is definitely true that this will decrease the percentage of our bluff working, it's not that relevant. As the impact that this will have on our bluff being plus EV is simply too small. So to have this very high up in our decision making process seems pretty useless. In reality, there are plenty of other variables that will have a greater impact on the EV of our play than blocking or unblocking. But since we just spent 100 hours in the solver, this is where our mind goes towards when having to make a decision. This steady decline in the winrate of professionals over the last few years has got me wondering, are the pros winning less because the field is becoming more GTO? Or are they winning less because they're trying to play GTO? Let us know your opinion in the comments down below.
