What is GTO?
GTO stands for “Game Theory Optimal.” It’s the biggest buzzword in poker strategy right now, but what the hell exactly does GTO mean? Is it a specific strategy to play? A high-level of thought process? A robotic method of playing hands? C-betting 1/3-1/2 pot?
I came up playing online poker pre-Black Friday, and in those days, GTO really wasn’t really a thing at all. I used to C-bet 3/4 pot on every hand and not think twice about it! Occasionally, you’d hear the term “game theory” thrown around in a podcast or training video, but in my mind, it was really only applicable to gambling scenarios, specifically, contrarian strategies. I could never really comprehend how it could be applied to poker because every hand of poker has so many unique variables that there could never be an “optimal” line to take.
Fast forward a few years and welcome to the world of poker solvers. While I am a complete rookie when it comes to solvers, I am starting to understand their power in analyzing optimal poker play. One will never fully be able to solve every poker problem possible, but the more hands that one can analyze, the more prepared for similar situations that player will be in any given hand.
I realize that I am very late to the poker-solver-GTO trend/party. Since the time that I had to give up online poker back in 2011, I’ve obviously focused on improving my live game. With live play, you don’t get in nearly the amount of volume that you do multi-tabling online. That said, I chose to ignore the GTO noise over the past couple years and simply focus my efforts on beating bad players and making money at the table. I lost my thirst to understand the game from a theoretical standpoint and simply opted for profitable, bankroll-building live strategy.
However, this past year PokerStars opened a legal site in my home state of PA, and I’ve put in 52,149 hands with a 9.64 bb/100. It’s not crazy volume, nothing like I used to do back in the day, but I’d argue that it’s more hands than I’ve played live in the past 9 years since Black Friday.
So with my new-found access to volume and online profit once again, I now have that thirst and energy to just get better at the game. Enter GTO. And let’s loop back to my initial question, what is GTO? Well, I aim to figure that out exactly in the coming weeks/months/years and write about it here.
