Anyway, I’ve had similar troubles: Dealing with Passive Players
For me, the answer has just been to take more notes on who plays this way, and exploit to an absurd degree. A recent example:
MTT, mid stages. I have AQo in MP and a decent stack of about 25bb. one of these meganits opens for 2x UTG. I flat instead of 3! because I think their range is extremely narrow, just premiums, basically.
Flop comes A-x-x rainbow and Villain leads 1bb. I call.
Turn is a brick; Villain leads 2bb. I call.
River I honestly don’t even remember but they bet 1/2 pot, I call, and lose to AK.
Normally I would have raised at approximately a dozen different points in this hand. Knowing how crazy top-heavy Villain’s range is, I took an absurdly passive line with a good-but-not-nutted hand and lost the minimum.
At some point it’s not their fault for playing “badly,” it’s our fault for not adjusting. Stop trying to make GTO plays against these guys. Their entire style is to underrep a strong hand and just call down. You won’t get folds when you’re “supposed” to; you’ll get looked up by QQ after betting all three streets on a wet runout. The weak-passives have learned this makes them money, because their weak-aggressive opponents make random bluffs and play way too many speculative draws.
Just play “best hand” mostly against these players. There are still a few spots where you can very profitably bluff, but you must be extremely selective. I usually wait for them to check a scary card post flop, indicating they are scared, rather than using my “image” to make preflop squeeze plays. In my experience that is much more reliable at the lower stakes.