For those of you who would like to learn the basics of poker, Johns Hopkins offers an online course: https://hopkinspokercourse.com/
MIT OCW also has a course on poker theory: https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/15-s50-poker-theory-and-analytic...
MIT OCW also has a course on poker theory: https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/15-s50-poker-theory-and-analytic...
That said about 80% of that book and 95% of anything written about poker before about 2019 is irrelevant to today’s games.
People never intended to play game theory optimal in the past; it was a war of “leveling” your opponent into making the wrong move. You would make money by playing an “exploitive strategy” meaning, you would make decisions that are not game theory optimal but do exploit your specific opponents tendency.
These days that doesn’t work beyond micros (or small stakes at a brick and mortar casino.)
Solvers, both the software and theory/knowledge have evolved so quickly in the last few years that the game has radically shifted toward simply playing an unexploitable GTO strategy better than your opponents.
The application of this is that at any given point during a hand you and your opponent have a "range" of hands (the term in the technical solver literature is an information set) that it would make sense for you to have from your opponents perspective. A range is a probalistic weighting of hands. Every action changes a players range, and for example if a player bluffs too much you can exploit that by calling with a bigger range against them.
So poker becomes a game of, rather than figuring out what your opponent has, instead establishing a baseline strategy that can't be exploited no matter what your opponent does and then adjusting that to optimally exploit your opponent.
That's the basic framework.
Another book recommendations is "Modern Poker Theory".
Of course, this is very hard to do in your head so, in practice, players rely on various principles and heuristics based on what the solver does in various situations.
Here's a pro explaining his thought process: https://www.partypoker.com/blog/en/its-the-same-game-but-it-...
But the basic idea is that you put in a range of starting hands for yourself and the opponent, and possible bet sizes, and the solver will brute force a play that approximates Nash equilibrium.
The output of the solver will be something like “45% of the time bet. 55% check.” Or “95% fold. 5% raise X”
The general loop as I understand it is inputting tricky/common situations running the solver and basically memorizing it.
people in live games are impatient degens, money will always be there with a basic strategy
add in a bit a leveling and you can print
source: i’m a degen whose loses all the time
I would like to introduce you to Hustler Casino Live. I assume that most of the games they steam are not B&M small stakes. There is plenty of room for exploitative play at higher stakes if you game select well. This is especially true if one has figured out the home game scene (where the best games are, imho).
Online on competitive sites, folks still make have relatively large gaps in their game up to nl100.
On online agent apps… lol, gto is not a thing except at 5/10 and higher (sometimes).
I will add that all of this is a discussion about nlhe.
There is a push to get away from solver-based games online because they are largely bad for the ecology. Casuals get fleeced rapidly, even by folks who implement a “gto” strategy poorly. Just having a good starting hand strategy/chart is usually a huge advantage alone.
The following are some ways that this is happening, and I think that these are the future of poker:
- plo
- more blinds/antes (3 blinds, big blind ante, short deck antes, etc.)
- bomb pots
- double board
- deep stack (most solver work is for 100bb or less)
- mixed games
Plo bomb pots are typically very much loved wherever they are played, and double board adds an extra element of skill. It lets causal gamblers gamble and get action (see every flop!), but there is a huge skill element that is not in solver territory yet.
Any poker scene for which a gto strategy can reasonably be implemented will rapidly wither to a small pecking order of pros. I hope folks in the poker playing community, especially pros and serious casuals, can embrace games where gto theory is not the baseline. It’s healthy for the poker ecology by keeping casuals involved and engaged.
It's funny how the meta-game works here. Fleecing the casuals is, of course, the way the pros make money; so it's basically the point of the game. But I can see how fleecing the casuals slowly is probably a better long-term strategy, that will ultimately extract more money from them, than doing it quickly, draining their bankroll, which may stop them from playing or get them to play less consistently.
This is exactly correct.
This is why it’s difficult to build and sustain a plo8/nlo8 ecology online or live. The good players just clean out the casuals so quickly and relatively risk free via freerolling. It largely only exists in a sustainable way in mixed rotations.
I was an online plo8 player who had to switch to plo to increase my game selection. It got to a point that I knew all of the other players at the table, and they were not giving up much in terms of ev (although most of them had exploitable gaps in their games).
All that said, most gto output assumes that your opponent is also playing gto. This is usually not the case, especially live. You can node lock in solvers to address this, but that’s a bit of a dark art since you have to assign unknown ranges to villain’s range — it’s just your best guess.
All that said, gto is a great mental exercise, and it has definitely improved my game.
> What's a good resource for learning GTO play?
Play optimal poker 1 and 2 by brokos. Good intro.
Modern poker theory by Acevedo for a little more advanced stuff.
Jonathon little has YT vids with some gto breakdown for hand analysis. He’s not a gto specialist, but he has one or more on his staff (iirc, Acevedo is/was one). His videos are on the simple side and are largely aimed at 1/3 and 2/5 live players, but it’s a soft intro.
Mariano poker on YT has improved a ton over the past few years. He seems to be relatively balanced while still exploiting when possible. His early vids show how to play (and not play) at lower stakes and win, at least in California games.
If you can see any stream with Garrett Adelstein, I would watch it. Mostly hustler live and live at the bike. He plays deep stack, and is a poker god among mere mortals.
> wouldn't mind getting to the point where I could sit down at a random NL100 or 200 B&M table and have an at least even expectation
If you were a winning online player before, you are currently +ev at 1/2 or 1/3 live tables.
The play is atrocious.
I will add that exploitative play is ideal at these stakes, and most gto is largely wasted.
It won’t be until some B&M 5/10 games and many 10/25 games and higher (usually with many pros) that you will see balanced play, although there is no small amount of exploitative play when whales are in the game.
Best of luck!
NL Hold ‘Em has progressed a lot but it’s far from solved.
It's a continuation of what we saw in the 2000s: entire sections of the book store dedicated to poker, selling confidence to millions of new players who misapply their concepts. There is still a lot of money to be made in micro- and small-stakes NLHE.