What you describe is impossible in poker even if there was a flaw in generation (which I absolutely do not believe in any way). I can totally see spotting a flaw in a keno draw to win big. It’s been done before. But there’s a massive difference between something like keno and cards at a poker table.
In keno, 20 numbers are drawn, in order, every x minutes. Everyone can see all of the numbers and no one can interfere with the draw order, so if one can crunch those numbers in a laptop, one can find patterns (if they exist).
In poker, 52 cards are shuffled and dealt, and each hand is different. It’s impossible to see the patterns that are dealt because every hand is played differently. Unless everyone shows at showdown you can’t see the pattern. Some hands you are full ring. Some hands you are 6 max, some hands you are heads up, so even if the cards come in a pattern, there is no way to “trend” a hand at showdown, since they will fall differently. If KQ are winning more because of a pattern, they have to fall into someone;s hand consistently, and they can’t because if KQ hits the small blind in full ring of 9, the deal pattern will give the Q to someone else as soon as one person leaves the table. And in a 6 max or a heads-up, that Q will be in the stub.
If there IS somehow a pattern, it will be in the deal and can’t possibly show up at the showdown.
I am no expert, my field is infectious control, and am neurodivergent, this topic should be left to those with the expertise in coding, I do have an ability for pattern recognition far above average, am a researching junky, and hold multiple patents in the medical field.
You see, the RNG may have a pattern but that pattern is 10,000,000,000 numbers long (say). To deal a deck of cards we only need a sequence of 52, so the RNG can use natural noise or something to stab anywhere into the middle of that pattern and retrieve a unique sequence of 52.
In ring games, the optimal opening range doesn’t change with effective stacks - the bet size just gets smaller as stacks get shallower (so using 2bb instead of 2.5)
Heads up in an MTT or Heads up SnG’s are another story. The hands that continue don’t change much until you get really shallow, but they can’t really because the solver is opening close to 100% of hands in most spots. (In MTT’s, there’s usually not a single hand that’s a pure fold, in HU SnG, it’s “only” opening 90-95% of hands). What does change significantly is the composition of limps, min raises and all-ins.
Broadly speaking you go from:
mostly min raising with some limps
mostly limping with some min raising
mostly limping with a mix of min raising and shoving (favoring shoving as stacks get shorter)
all-in or fold
Ranges tighten up slightly the more all-in’s you have, but you’re still supposed to open about 75% of hands even when in pure push-fold territory.
What is the variable in the solver for observation of your opponent’s going card dead, far below opening range, and when to exploit that scenario, or is that not even considered? and where is the solver for understanding the odds of your opponent hitting anything on the flop in relation to range cycles, on the fly? this GTO did not fare well against players like goatsoup when he was here, he ate GTO players for breakfast. I now have shifted to some of the things I learned from him and like the results.
GTO doesn’t account for exploits because it can’t. To the solver, the hand at question is the only hand that exists. That’s why the best players in the world use the optimal play as a baseline and then tweak each hand to exploit each opponent if they feel that they have an exploit or tell.
So your saying GTO is high school and if you make it through college you might be a good poker player.
GTO must have some sort of goal, what is the goal? what is a good player?, what is the ITM ROI standard to achieve?
Here are my last 1125 games. do I meet the goals?
If people were capable of playing a GTO strategy, they would be unbeatable, so that metaphor doesn’t really fit.
It’s more just that there isn’t much value is trying to play a pure GTO strategy against opponents who are so easily exploitable.
GTO opening ranges aren’t that hard to learn though (to a reasonable approximation at least). It’s also rarely that profitable to deviate from them as an exploit.
The amount of time I have to spend justifying even a very vague approximation of a GTO strategy, rather than describing it and discussing how to implement it/when to deviate, is so frustrating
Can we please all just agree to take as a given that no, [insert name here], your ad hoc strategy derived from personal experience actually isn’t better than the strategy created by a computer running millions of Monte Carlo iterations and currently in use by literally every top pro? Christmas!
I never played goatsoup but he did not “eat GTO players for breakfast.” What he did, if anything, was win with exploitative play against players who maybe thought they were playing GTO but in practice were probably nowhere close. If you are actually succeeding in implementing something reasonably close to a GTO strategy, there are exactly two ways to explain losing big:
small sample size
sustained run of bad variance across a small sample size
If you noticed those are actually the same thing, congrats, dear reader—you win a prize!
Anyone who disagrees is welcome to purchase one of the many interfaces that lets you “play against the computer” and report back when they’ve posted a virtual profit over 10k hands. At that point I will happily send you a few thousand dollars of real money and stake you to take a trip to Vegas for our mutual financial gain
@southwestmba my chest sprouted 6 more hairs just looking at that picture
anyway to @lihiue’s point about GTO ranges, I’d estimate fully half my edge in MTT HU play on Replay comes from the simple fact that one often arrives at this stage with 20bb or fewer, and I’ve semi-memorized the Upswing push/fold charts for 15bb (available for FREE on their website!), and pretty much none of my opponents have. You just close your eyes and follow the chart and you win chips. It’s very easy and fun
sure sometimes you shove A6o and run into AJ or heaven forbid AA and lose, which feels bad, but any strategy that assiduously avoids such eventualities is just losing even more EV in other ways. you’ll run into those hands such a small % of the time that the chips you win by being willing to correctly shove A6o at the proper stack depth far outstrip the losses when Villain wakes up with a monster.
playing against people who have no idea about convention sucking you out
Every pro will tell you, don’t use GTO against fish. Just exploit them. For instance, solver might tell you than in spot x 9 times out of 10 villain doesn’t have it so call call call, but solver doesn’t take into account that villain is a super nit and always has it. Another example, spot y solver will tell you this is a bluff but solver doesn’t take into account that villain is a call station.
GTO is a must if you seriously want to play medium to high stakes and make money, but you don’t always have to stick to it. The better the players (who also understand optimal) the more that you stick to it, the worse the players, the less you use GTO.
Right. Long-run, GTO is never losing, but that doesn’t mean more exploitative strategies won’t be more winning, especially against opponents who make such consistent and glaring errors as the average recreational player (the simplest example being the Tight Passive Nit, against whom we can massively overfold some spots and massively overbluff others without a care in the world).
I understand you are highly intelligent Luke, I am not really interested in getting into any type of negative outcome conversation with you. I am one of your cheerleaders.
I have noticed that you are unable to communicate without an emotional tone in your writing, I wonder if this is exploitable in your poker game.
@lihiue across all threads/forums seems to be calm from what I have seen, displaying intelligence and recall not reached by 99.99% of the population.
I don’t find much entertainment to belittle people you assume you are superior to.
A few months back I started reading BlackRain79s blog/youtube and following this bestselling poker author, but clearly this guy does not agree with you.
He says some things somewhat relatable to a free poker site if you would classify it as micro stakes, or low level poker. BalckRain79 GTO is a bad idea
I belive that GTO was in the brains of great poker players long before someone gave it a name.
I also believe it’s a good thing, but I am old and crusty from the Brunson days when calculators were not allowed in school.
It is one tool in a very large bag of tools, but as BlackRain says
Enter GTO poker strategy. Every poker math nerd’s fantasy.
This is a poker “system” which essentially tries to turn the game of poker into one big math equation and create “optimal” ranges for every situation.
Sounds good in theory right?
But of course poker isn’t actually a game that is played in theory!
Poker is instead a game played in real time between real people, who at the micro stakes often make large fundamental mistakes, and base their decisions off of emotion or superstition instead of logic and mathematics.
Thanks @_Rain excellent feedback. I will watch the tone. I get frustrated because I want to get to the good stuff and feel like some of these digressions are fruitless and unjustified, but that’s on me!
I don’t think it’s productive to keep having the “is it really random?” discussion, for instance. And I am getting impatient with facing the constant rejoinder that “you can’t play that loose, you’ll lose” when all I’m doing is parroting the advice of the erstwhile #1 HU NLHE player in the world, who absolutely mopped the floor with Daniel Negreanu in their heads-up challenge using more or less this strategy as a baseline.
And I apologize for branching this thread. But for me, I believe all threads should be open discussions no matter what direction they go, or else we would have 10 million threads. Every time somebody wants a new topic or discuss what they feel has an effect on the topic itself.
I’m very familiar with blackrain79. I’ve watched hours and hours of his videos which are all about exploiting low and micro stakes, which applies to Replay.
Younguru is right that playing rigid optimal style will win in the long run. Over a million hands you’ll be up, guaranteed. But playing smart exploitative against fish over those same million hands, you’ll be way way WAY up!
Now, what blackrain79 means by GTO being a bad idea, is not only that it minimizes your winnings against fish at low stakes, it also confuses the hell out of a new player trying to stop being a fish.
Before you tackle learning GTO, learn the basics:
1 ~ pocket value ~ don’t play with rags, learn the difference between elite hands, good hands, overvalued hands, so-so hands and junk
2 ~ know your position ~ play elite hands any time, play good hands in later position, play so-so hands when everyone limps, be careful with overvalued hands (A7s etc) ~ or thereabouts
3 ~ understand what your opponent’s range ROUGHLY is ~ remember just basics here ~ someone opening 3x from UTG has a tight range, someone caliing from the button has a wide range ~ real basics
4 ~ learn player types and tendencies ~ never bluff always value bet call stations, always bluff never call nits ~ etc
and a few other basic things.
Once you play with these basics for a while and get a good feel for them, THEN study advanced optimal play. There is no way that someone is going to understand what a good bluff spot is if they are playing 50% of their hands and calling every thin bet post flop. Jumping into GTO is probably bad for your brain.
Basics, basics, basics first. Gain confidence with basic fundamentals and win some low stakes. THEN learn optimal.
