The comments here are so heavily jargon laden that I have no idea what I was reading.. gto, plo, nlo, then with numbers behind them, etc.. Is there a glossary to understand those terms?
Yes, poker enthusiasts tend to use a ton of jargon from the game. There are plenty of glossaries but you need to have a basic understanding of the game to make sense of most of it. Like this: https://www.888poker.com/magazine/poker-terms
The terms you mentioned:
GTO: Game Theory Optimal
PLO: Pot Limit Omaha (different from NL - "No Limit" Texas Hold'em). "Pot Limit" means your max bet can only be as much money as is in the pot at the time.
NLO: No Limit Omaha - That restriction on pot size is not there
NL or PLO/PL with numbers means the amount of money you bring on the table, typically 100x the big blind. So NL200 means a games with blinds $1/$2 (blinds are the obligatory bets at the beginning of a game so that there is something to play for).
On certain sites the same game would be named NL $1/$2, some players might refer to it as 1/2 NL (pronounce one-two NL), but it's the same NL200 (sometimes 200NL) game.
In limit games (with fixed bets) you would usually give the amount of the blinds. And some games have more complicated betting structures, for example with antes, but let's not get into that.
https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Glossary_of_poker_terms helped for me.
gto means game theory optimal, basically an attempt at a mathematically optimal way of playing poker. plo is pot limit omaha, nlo is no limit omaha. Both are variants of poker.
You don't have to stop playing. Kasparov (59) still plays here and there and he's still pretty great. Anand is 52 and is 13th in the world.
Chess requires a crazy amount of time invested and you're likely going to stop, and definitely slow, making gains at a certain age. Lots of people play chess for reasons other than becoming the world champion (since obviously most won't).
That said I play online chess too much and it's sort of a waste of time ;)
Yeah, it's sad to see champions giving up chess in their 30s but I can also see the desire to leave on a high note, before you've declined, and also spend your life on other things- you've already shown you're the best so why invest all that time and effort into keeping your title? There's definitely diminishing returns.
If you're talking about competitive players, they don't give up, they stop competing professionally and usually go on to teach. Competitive chess is a gruelling full time job.
The book “no limit theory and practice” continues to be the most valuable poker book I’ve read.
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.
> These days that doesn’t work beyond micros (or small stakes at a brick and mortar casino.)
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.
> 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).
What's a good resource for learning GTO play? I used to be a decent small to medium stakes player, studied a few 2+2 books, that kind of thing, but haven't played much in the past decade or so. Don't have any plans to get back into it seriously, but 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.
Let me start off by saying that GTO is not the panacea some folks want it to be. It helps find some new lines for sure, it is really good at short stack problems, it helps a lot with starting hand ranges, and it is quite good for hu play.
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.
Most of what you say is accurate however it’s worth understanding that GTO really only applies in specific situations. E.g., heads up (2 players) play. GTO is unable to produce an unexploitable strategy against 2+ players. Additionally, as a matter of practical application, less of theory, GTO suffers in ultra deep stacked heads up play where effective stacks are > 500 BB deep.
NL Hold ‘Em has progressed a lot but it’s far from solved.
Yeah, I've come to start smacking my lips when my opponents start parroting "GTO" and related jargon. Their understanding of it is more dangerous to them than it is to me.
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.
Fascinating. I haven’t played or thought about poker in 15 years. Can you elaborate more on the current strategy of poker? A real example would be helpful.
A large idea in modern poker theory is playing the Nash equilibrium strategy. A Nash equilibrium is where no player can improve their expected result by unilaterally changing their strategy, and two player games provably have the property that if you play any Nash equilibrium strategy, you expected value will always be greater than or equal to your EV when your opponent also plays an equilibrium strategy.
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".
At every decision point, you know what your range is and what your opponent range is. Then you choose one or two bet/raise sizes based on the board and the ranges. Then you split your range into categories: value bet, call, bluff, fold. And then you look at your hole cards and play based on its category.
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.
I can only tell you my perspective as an ex poker pro who has not studied with solvers.
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.
In my opinion the most valuable book that is still relevant from pre-19 is Mathematics of Poker. But proper poker study should come from playing around with solvers, ideally with somebody who can guide you through not making the most common mistakes.
The MIT course videos are quite poor. The slides are often not shown, and order of information presented is a confusing jumble that talks about advanced things before explaining basics.
It’s funny that the two examples used to illustrate his play (the 10 2) stories are examples of him making extremely bad reads on his opponent and bad beating them. I can only assume that’s him massaging the narrative a bit to help him win in the future, cause it isn’t great poker playing.
These hands are so memorable and well-known not because they’re great reads, but simply because it’s so unlikely to win back to back championships with the same lousy cards.
Whether those particular hands are examples of great poker doesn’t really matter because poker isn’t really about any single hand, but performance over many hands. In both cases, Brunson outlasted the competition and whittled away his opponents’ stacks until he had them against the ropes and increased the odds that they would make a desperate move. Those are examples of great poker playing.
I think inspiring a bunch of amateurs to make plays with mostly garbage is a great example of a +EV play.
Additionally with two pair heads up you need to get it in, the stuff about making reads gives amateur players the license to go nuts because they feel like it, again +EV. Dolly knew the odds better than almost anyone for a very long time, objectively we've learned a lot about poker in the last few years, and it's not fair to judge his play vs today's standards.
I haven't played a lot in a while, but my first thought is what you say in the second line: you're the big stack, you're heads up at the end of a tournament, you want to keep pressure on your opponent, and then once you even hit something like two-pair, seems like you want to make them have even less if they fold, or get a good shot at ending the game if they call all-in.
Is this outdated in general? From the talk below about GTO-and-heads-up is the assumption that it'd be dangerous now to assume anyone who's still in at that point doesn't have something better than you?
What's outdated is the idea that you can get any advantage from the times you have two pair compared to the times your opponent does.
Situations like this are akin to an "I cut, you choose" situation. Hypothetically, you want to size your bet such that all possible responses lead to the same expected negative EV for the opponent and positive for you, with a layer of fuzziness so that your bet size doesn't always give away what you hold. That's what is meant by non-exploitable game strategy. Doyle's original advantage was knowing that bet sizing and fuzziness more precisely than anyone else, from a combination of intuition and calculation, and also in reading the opponent's propensity to inaccurately calculate and take advantage of that too. What's changed in the last few years is that now everyone and their bots know the proper calculations as Doyle always did - and they're also good at reading your bet sizing to correctly guess that you have the two pair.
Your description is still right for a single situation: with a stack advantage, yes you want to apply pressure. What's changed is the aggregation over many such situations, where your opponents have two pair just as often and play it just as well as you do.
Have you tried playing a live poker game in a casino? Beating this type of game has very little to do with playing a non exploitable strategy. Even up to 5/10 you have recs playing completely unbalanced so it’s better to just size your bets to get max value from worse hands or make better hands fold. Nobody is going to exploit you in a 2-3 hour session for doing this.
Not sure what makes great poker playing, but I think it's what happens on the edges of that story.
The article says he wore his opponent down little by little -- and then won a big hand. So there's that -- accruing that big lead in the first place. (Which happens in both stories)
And then at that point the logic is different -- Brunson can effectively end the game and win the tournament if he wins the next hand. Even if your odds are 50-50, since you've got more money to gamble with than your opponent, it's probably worth it to take that shot.
Also, in this story he has two pairs. The odds of your opponent having two pairs on any given hand are just 4.7539%. (And the odds of it being higher than a pair of 10s is much lower than 2%). So betting high was the right move -- despite the fact that his opponent, by an incredibly unlikely fluke, seemed to have a better hand with one card left to flip. (Which is sort of meaningless, because the fifth card counts.)
But throughout the article, it also shows Brunson following a long-standing poker principle: playing the man and not the cards. ("Brunson knew that Alto tended to get impatient after losing big.") Even getting your opponent to risk all their chips is a challenge in poker -- but Brunson knew he could make that happen. (And knew exactly how...)
I think the larger point is he won the championship two years in a row. You just don't do that without tremendous skill. But even if that doesn't convince you of poker-playing greatness: it's still a tremendous story -- that he won both championships with essentially the same crappy 10-2 hand.
"To this day, the ten-deuce is known as the 'Doyle Brunson.'"
He pushed enough chips into the middle to force Alto to go all in with the rest of his stack. Alto called. “What’ve you got?” Brunson asked. Alto flipped over an ace and a jack, giving him the stronger two-pair hand. Brunson showed his ten-deuce and said, “You’ve got me beat.” The dealer flipped the card. Ten of diamonds. Brunson had won the Main Event.
The next year: Brunson had been working his opponent, Gary “Bones” Berland, and figured he had him on the ropes. He started with the same exact hand: ten-deuce. The communal cards gave Brunson two pair, and he bet before the dealer turned over the “river.” Berland went all in. The final card showed a ten, giving Brunson a full house and making the back-to-back champion a bona fide poker superstar.
lots of misinformation here about the current state of play with respect to GTO. If you're interested in understanding the principles of GTO and how amateurs currently leverage it check out the Finding Equilibrium youtube channel. Specifically, there's a series where this guy teaches his girlfriend to play poker by building heuristics that generally mimic solver advice. It's a cool way to see how solvers are changing the live poker game; from this relatively basic series you can extrapolate how professionals refine their strategies and heuristics to get very close to solver approval in the majority of situations.
this must be why i see crazy shoves with seemingly turd hands on pokerstars but bad beats on there is roughly 4~5x greater than other places due to sheer volume of players.
I don't know I never bothered learning all these things because it felt like it was taking the fun out of it so I mostly just play on feelings/intuition.
After I stopped reading theories and books I started to improve massively although I never play on Pokerstars anymore.
