4/2/2022

Learn Gto Poker

You might have heard of game theory optimal (GTO) or GTO poker solvers before. You might have also heard that you shouldn't try to play GTO, that you should only play an ABC poker strategy - a simple yet effective that should beat your incompetent opponents. However you would be wrong.

Learn Gto Poker developers featured on the platform is NetEnt, a company which claims to have developed Learn Gto Poker the very first online casino games. It has continually embraced modern technology and has been a major trendsetter in the industry. Another notable company which develops Learn Gto Poker games for this casino is Play n Go. 3 Ways GTO Can Improve Your Live Game. To say GTO is a big buzzword in poker today is an understatement. Quite frankly, the time for you as a poker player to learn what GTO is was yesterday. But no worries, we’re going to get you up to speed quickly so you won’t get left behind.

GTO solvers are basically a super calculator for poker which allows players to set-up a hand scenario and find the optimal solution to that situation. You basically ask the solver a question and it gives you the GTO answer.

Has poker been solved and turned into a game like Tic Tac Toe?

There are still limitations to what GTO solvers can do.

For example, they currently only solve for heads-up confrontations. But there’s a lot of benefits to using a GTO solver. They aren’t cheap. And often the learning curve deters people.

This article we’ll weigh up the benefits and pitfalls of using a GTO poker solver. And reveal how to get the most out of using a GTO solver.

Is GTO the best poker strategy?

When it comes to beating poker, the term ‘GTO’ often gets thrown around like it’s the ultimate strategy. The idea of pure game theory optimal solutions (i.e. equilibria) works most effectively when players are playing perfect strategy. However, that isn’t often the case.

I HAVEN’T studied Tic Tac Toe, but I’m confident as the player going first, selecting the middle box as the first move would be optimal.

I HAVE studied poker for years, and sometimes I’m still not sure of the best play in a certain situation!

Poker is a complex game. As human players, we don’t consistently make optimal decisions. Some rarely do!

So what good is an equilibrium strategy when our opponent is deviating far from using an optimal game plan? After all, the importance of adjusting to your opponent and the mantra of ‘play the man’ has been at the crux of winning poker strategy since Cowboys on tilt were drawing pistols in saloons.

Here's a short video that addresses the role GTO plays in the poker world.

The power of GTO poker solvers

Well firstly, there are still certain takeaways from observing a GTO solver work its magic and plot an equilibrium solution. And secondly, solvers do allow you to set parameters so you can calculate an optimal strategy when playing a non-perfect player.

Benefits from eyeballing equilibrium play

Being able to eyeball a perfect strategy is a useful learning aid. It’s not always practical for the specific game type and opponents a player encounters in their regular games. But seeing a perfect strategy being modeled can be very thought provoking.

Especially when a players style of play differs in spots from the GTO mold. Players in a sense are forced to reflect on their own play and question why they exhibit certain tendencies.

Are they exploiting a certain opponent weakness or population tendency? Or is it a bad habit that’s developed that their opponents can capitalize on?

GTO Poker Solver Example

Let’s take cbetting small pairs on the flop as an example. Solvers like to bet very small pairs in a lot of instances on the flop. These marginal holdings benefit greatly from taking the pot down on the early street. They have few outs to improve, and so the board texture usually develops unfavourably for them.

It makes sense to protect them in a lot of situations. But some players might frequently check back the flop rather than cbet figuring they just want to try to showdown with a weak hand.

Identifying these types of smart strategical patterns helps players modify and improve their own play. Here’ a few more examples;

  • How is middle pair played?
  • Should BB check-raise low boards a lot on the flop?
  • What’s the role blockers play in spots?
  • Backdoor flush draw play
  • When do solvers over-bet the river?
  • Should ace high cbet dry flops?

Some of which might be instantly beneficial if incorporated into a players game

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Benefits from locking opponent strategies

Frequently as we observe opponent play we notice tendencies they have. Additionally using a HUD or poker tracking software online will sometimes expose bad habits.

Once you’ve locked on to what you believe to be an opponent weakness, you can configure the poker solver to plot a new optimal strategy based on this information.

This approach of analyzing a GTO strategy for the specific opponent you’re playing against is a powerful tool solver's offer and is usually referred to as ‘locking a strategy’ or ‘setting a strategy’.

It’s the best feature for most solver users because it allows for relevant, specific hand analysis based on the real situations you encounter regularly. And you can gain insight into how a solver goes about adjusting to take advantage of deviations from equilibria.

GTO Solver Example #1 : Video

For example, take the passive opponent that rarely check raises us on the flop. Since we'll get to realize our equity more often, we can cbet at a high frequency. Taking advantage of the fact we rarely get blown off our hand on the flop. Which was the situation a student asked me about recently, as discussed in the video below.

GTO Solver Example #2: Check Raising

Or perhaps you’ve spent some time playing with an opponent and he seems to be cbetting 100% on the flop, poker solvers allow you to input this tendency and work out the best response.

Whilst it might be obvious to some that check-raising a player over cbetting is likely to be a good strategy, solvers provide more than just an ideal fold percentage, call percentage and raise percentage.

Additional insights such as; what parts of your range fit best as fold/call/raise, what raise sizing is best, your equity and EV for the situation, how you should proceed on various turn and river outcomes, and all the while what your opponent’s responses should be to your moves. In fact, the extensive amount of data presented can be a little overwhelming to a first time user.

Players modifying solvers to better represent their opponent’s behavior, frequently express overall improvements in their game from the knowledge they gain.

Seeing how a solver adjusts to different situations prepares players for the next time they encounter a similar situation.

Moreover, solver users tend to get a better handle on how they should be playing their range of hands as opposed to a specific hand. Which makes any player more savvy on the felt. As well as players expressing how they start to see the game more in depth, by being able to visualize a hands decision points as branches on a game tree.

This often assists with recognizing opponent leaks and identifying opportunities to exploit. And serves to place importance on strategy as a whole. Where ultimately, consistently making better decisions than your opponents over time, leads to winning results.

Limitations Of Poker Solvers

Locking strategies requires a little more than the basic knowledge of using the solver and if not executed correctly, it could lead to unreliable results.

Use of this feature requires you to be able to fairly accurately gauge your opponent’s tendencies. And this is where a considerable ‘human element’ still remains. In fact, from the get go when you are selecting hands to include in your opponents range, and setting bet sizes, the more accurately you can set the parameters in the solver to reflect the game situation the more reliable the calculations will be.

Unfortunately, this often brings about another limitation solvers have, the time it can take to compute. Especially when setting multiple bet and raise sizes. As the game tree gets larger, so does processing time. Whilst simpler solutions might only take a minute or 2, having several betting and raising sizes, as well as the option to lead bet, might take the better part of an hour to process. And that’s presuming your PC is relatively up to date.

For extremely complex calculations, such as running scripts or doing heavy preflop work, people sometimes rent servers or use cloud computing. Or you could let the computer run over night.

To speed up regular hand calculations, compromises can be made. For small concessions in accuracy, considerable time can often be saved. With results still acceptably accurate.

So solvers can provide GTO solutions to the heads-up scenarios you encounter at the table. Calculations that are extremely accurate, and fast enough to be usable.

So which GTO poker software is right for me?

Way

The three most competitive solvers, with positive reviews, are;

  • GTO Range Builder- More graphical/visual. Web version only. Lots of educational material (though the content is reported to be quite overwhelming for beginners).
  • SimplePostflop- More tabular. Standalone version. Can start the analysis preflop.
  • PioSOLVER- More tabular. Standalone version. Preferred by most players for its less complicated operation and functionality.

A discussion comparing the best poker solvers, PioSOLVER and GTORB, can be found in this post and responses on Two Plus Two.

Players new to solvers often have good things to say about GTO Range Builder. It has a web interface and is quite fast whilst some also consider it to be moderately easy to use.

However, my recommendation would be PioSOLVER. It’s operation and functionality consistently gets good reviews. And for some of the more difficult capabilities, there’s always tutorials and videos available, all backed by excellent support. There’s even a Skype group new customers can join.

See how to simulate a hand, analyze the data, and take-aways from using a GTO solver with Acesup from our 26 minute premium content video below:

The price point is also competitive for solvers, with the basic version coming in at $249.

There’s also a pro version for $475 (which offers 2 installs, and scripting capability), as well as an edge version for $1,099. Pricey because it includes a preflop solver.

Can it really help me? Will it be worth it?

If you don’t do study away from the tables and are hoping for a wonder toy calculator that will make things easy for you. It’s unlikely you’ll get anything out of owning a solver. As has always been the case with poker, the more effort you put in the more you’ll get out of it.

And to be able to get a lot out of a solver, you do need to put the work in. From learning the functions and using them properly to interpreting results and implementing positive changes to your game. The onus is on you.

If you’re willing to put in the work, the rewards are definitely there. For cash game players, MTT’ers or SNG players. If you’re a serious player trying to move up in stakes. If you’re focused on winning. The opportunity to expand your knowledge of the game and implement strong winning strategies is attainable.

Use of poker GTO solvers is on the rise but certainly isn’t a ‘main stream’ application to have. In the future, with better technology solvers might be simple add-ons to a lot of the programs most players have become accustomed to using. Like a basic poker equity calculator, such as equilab.

For now, they are still sophisticated applications only a limited number of players have embraced. Getting in sooner rather than later might provide you with an edge over your rivals.

Get the most out of your poker solver

Along with the specific makers having youtube channels with tutorials, most poker training sites also have videos where GTO solvers are used. Coaches often use the popular PioSOLVER to gain more insight when analyzing situations at the table. There are several videos at sites like RunItOnce and several tutorials are part of the PokerNerve library.

Here’s a glimpse at a PokerNerve tutorial. This video demonstrates one of the ways people are benefitting from using PioSOLVER for study.

Conclusion

Despite solvers having their limitations;

  • Somewhat cumbersome to learn and use
  • Calculations are slow to process
  • Pricey for the lower limit player

GTO poker solvers provide studious players with a powerful learning tool;

  • Ability to work out GTO solutions
  • Calculate optimal strategic responses to situations encountered at the table

Examining GTO solutions allows players to identify and learn strong strategical concepts. Such as how often to cbet, what size, and with what types of hands. How often to check-raise in spots. What cards to barrel on, and so forth.

General takeaways that can help a player improve their overall game plan, and gain a better understanding of what their opponents might be doing as well.

Furthermore, by using the lock strategy feature you can calculate optimal strategic responses to opponent tendencies you’ve discovered.

Exploring specific solutions to situations you encounter against opponents from your regular games. So you can see how to take action and exploit them.

It’s not a quick magical solution. But if you’re willing to put in the effort to learn and get accustomed to using a solver. The reward is having a powerful poker computing device that will help you improve your poker skill. Giving you an edge at the tables.

One of the quickest way to improve your poker game is to take on a course or join a poker training site; if that is something that interests you be sure to check out the PokerNerve Road to Success Course.

Last updated: 07/01/20

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One of the most common questions that I get from players who are looking to get started with learning GTO and integrating GTO concepts is 'where do I start?'. Over the last year or two I've put out so many videos / blog posts / strategy packs, etc that it can be difficult to know where the jump in, whether you are completely new to GTO or whether you already have a strong fundamental understanding of GTO concepts.
At the bottom of this post I'm going to put links to all of our relevant GTO articles, videos, strategy packs, quizzes and brainteasers so that hopefully this post can be a one-stop place to learn everything you need to do to master GTO concepts and apply them to your game.
But before I lay out the curriculum I want to start by answering one of the most common and fundamental questions that every player should ask themselves before learning GTO theory and strategy.

Why should I learn GTO?

The core answer is simple very simple, to win more money! How exactly understanding GTO theory does this however is more complex and often very misunderstood so I want to directly state the core values of learning GTO strategy and dispel some of the misinformation that is out there. Perhaps the biggest misconception is the idea that the goal of learning GTO is so that we can play the GTO strategy 100% of the time and abandon exploitative play completely. As we'll see below that is of course ridiculous, and in fact, an understanding of GTO is an invaluable tool in identifying and exploiting leaks in our opponents play.
At the poker table we are going to encounter a variety of players of various skill levels who play a wide variety of strategies. At various times we will be playing in a situation where we have no read whatsoever on our opponents, or against a player who we know is stronger than us. At other times we will be playing against weaker players who have clearly defined strategy errors that we believe they are unlikely to correct and that we can exploit.
Our ability to win in the long run requires that we can both play fundamentally strong poker that is difficult for our opponents to exploit in situations where we are readless or against strong opposition, while also being able to quickly identify and attack leaks in our opponents' strategies in ways that do not open us up to counter exploitation. Both of these goals are nearly impossible to achieve without a strong understanding of GTO strategy.
Lets begin by considering how to identify and attack leaks in our opponents. Lets imagine that you are facing an opponent in a 100bb cash game who raised UTG to 3x and you flatted from the button and the other players folded. He c-bets 80% of the pot on a AT3r flop. You look at your HUD and note that this players OOP c-bet frequency in single raised pots is 62% and that he opens UTG about 17%. How should we react to his c-bet with various parts of our range?
It turns out that without a reasonable knowledge of GTO strategy the question above is very difficult to answer and in fact that for years 'standard' play approached this situation incorrectly. We first might want to ask, is a 62% out of position c-bet frequency too high (and thus should be exploited by calling or raising a much higher % than usual and by betting near 100% after he checks a flop) or to low which of course would be exploited differently.. This is impossible to know without knowing what the correct, unexploitable c-bet frequency is in out of position pots.
With GTO computation we can actually directly asses what an appropriate c-bet frequency on this board is (about 15%) and browse the entire GTO strategy and compare it to how we think our opponent plays. You can see an example of that here: http://gtorangebuilder.com/#share_calc=AhTc3s_817242a1f8d8ce5f75f7b848fcf709b0. We can then lock in our opponents incorrect c-betting strategy and optimize our play computationally against that.
For a long time many players, who at the time were considered quite good, c-bet a very high frequency here. They got away with it because no one had the tools or knowledge to correctly identify and exploit the leak.
However, we now know that there are very few boards where c-betting more than 50% of the time as an UTG raiser vs a BTN call is GTO, so c-betting 62% on average is way too high. This player is c-betting far too aggressively so we should attack his c-bet. If we have enough of a read to know that this play might c-bet 62% on this specific flop texture we could use a minimally exploitative strategy calculation (which you can learn about below) to determine that even if our opponent plays the turn and river perfectly we can probably raise this bet with as much of 20% (~3x as often as we would raise against a GTO c-bettor) of our range and we should only fold the about a third of our range, netting an EV gain of about half a big blind in a single hand.
If we believe our opponent at least recognizes that AT3r is a board that should be c-bet from OOP less often than an average board we might exercise a bit more caution but we can again estimate his c-betting range and determine that we should raise/call far more than usual.
Without knowing what the GTO c-betting strategy is like is this spot we cannot identify strategy errors. We can note that some players c-bet in a spot more or less than the population average but we have no way to be sure if that is a mistake or actually play that is better than the population and history shows that significant population level strategy errors can exist in 'standard' play for years before they are exploited and fixed.
Similarly consider the situation where we open a 17% UTG range and get flatted by an unknown player in the BTN (or a very tough player). Since GTO play will grind out a steady profit against sub-optimal players and because we have no specific read on the exact leaks in the BTNs game, our best bet in this spot is generally going to be to c-bet according to GTO. By having a fundamentally solid and well structured c-betting range in this spot we will increase our win-rate against unknowns and prevent stronger players from exploiting errors in our play. We can neither prevent leaks from appearing in our own game, nor can we systematically identify and exploit leaks in other players games without knowing what exactly 'leak free' GTO play looks like.
So hopefully that gives you guys motivation to put in the study time and become GTO experts. Here's how you can do it.

How To Learn Gto Poker Strategy


How To Learn Gto Poker

GTO Resources / Learning Path

  • Free Video Track
  • Brainteasers
  • Card Runners Series (not free)
  • GTO Quizzes
  • Theory fundamentals articles
  • Applied Strategy Posts
  • Flop Solution Library
  • Premium Strategy Packs (not free)

Best Way To Learn Gto Poker