When GTO strategy arrived on the scene it promised a new exciting and modern way to play the game. Modern, certainly, but it did not make things exciting.
As we will see, GTO strategies and GTO solvers have had quite a few unintended consequences to the poker ecosystem, most of them not being good for the game.
Exaggerated Importance of GTO
In the old days, poker players would play a tight ABC style while also trying to pick up on their opponent’s tendencies. Post poker boom this situation morphed into a situation that is generally more aggressive.
Fast-forward to the post-Black Friday games and we find ourselves swamped with players trying to find out what a perfect strategy is. They want to make automatic profit without ever having to do any serious work.
This is such a dry form of poker that it is no surprise that players have been turned from the game when encountering it.
This brainwashing effect that has pushed new players into thinking this is what they have to do to be successful is having a detrimental consequence on the health of the game.
GTO Is Not the Future
If this GTO sub-culture in the poker community continues it will become the worst possible advertisement of the game.
Poker is such a rich and interesting game it should be promoted as such. It is a discipline of mental athletics where players square up to pit their wits against each other.
The game of chess has suffered a similar fate over the last 15 years since computers became strong enough to defeat the best human players. Now players who are complete beginners are spending many hours learning opening moves by rote and checking the computer’s suggestions.
The pitfall of this approach is that these players never learn how to think for themselves. This is exactly what is crushing so many micro stakes players in poker.
They learn a system how to play, often dictated by a GTO solver, but find themselves lost in spots they haven’t covered yet. With no experience in thinking lines through from basic principles this is a recipe for disaster.
Exploitative Vs Balanced
In some ways, the GTO strategies are what happens when talk about balance goes too far. We used to discuss keeping a mix of strong hands and weak hands in our range in most spots.
Now players are becoming obsessed with having the perfect blend just so they can memorise and forget what their opponent might be thinking.
It is a fact that unless we play in high-stakes games with world -class elite players then an exploitative approach will always be the most profitable. GTO adherents seem to want to ignore this.
The move to ban HUD’s by sites such as partypoker is a step in the right direction. While HUD’s generally only display information that is read at the table in a more accurate form, they have become so advanced that they themselves have become a part of the problem.
The most important lesson here is that new players should not be put off from taking up the game feeling they will have to perform like robots. Leave the elite players to carry on perfecting their already advanced strategies. There is no need for this for the rest of us.
The average opponent makes so many big mistakes. We should always be concentrating on how to exploit this, rather than playing a GTO line that will be less profitable in the long run.
Don’t forget to check out the latest poker news to hear what’s been going on.
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