GTO Poker Real Talk
How aspiring players on Micro-, Low- and partially even Midstakes should use Solvers/GTO.
(Make sure to bookmark this to not forget it).
Yes, I am highly skeptical of GTO in many situations. However, I also recognize its usefulness when applied correctly.
I am tired of coaches trying to teach you their "you don’t need GTO at all" approach, or the other direction: "You need GTO to crush".
I will show you a good balance, and help you understand when it is needed and when not.
I believe that most coaches are simply not good enough to truly understand GTO and its impact (especially for online poker, which is a lot tougher than live poker), and how to really use it. Therefore, they try to tell you that you don’t need it at all and should just play "street poker" or whatever.
Some of you will be confused. “Ben, didn’t you always say you don’t need GTO?”
I never said that. I always shared my skepticism about the way people learn and apply GTO.
However, how are you supposed to know how to exploit someone and identify leaks if you don’t know the baseline – the theory?
I will also share my way of max utilizing the real power of solvers.
Using a solver early in your career can be beneficial or harmful to your career as a poker player.
Spoiler: I do believe solvers are extremely powerful for experienced poker players and high-stakes players who can put the outputs into context and understand which strategies are useful and which are not realistic and would be rather bad to implement.
Funny enough, even when studying with other high-stakes players, we would of course use solvers – but we’d always ask ourselves how realistic the output is, and what exploits or conclusions we can derive from it.
And low-stakes players/beginners believe they can learn through using a solver on their own.
The most powerful way to learn the game is to have someone explaining to you the strategies the solver is providing and putting it into context. Explaining to you the “WHY” – why do we do this and why do we do that?
Imagine having a math teacher writing the solutions on the board without any explanations. You see the solutions/results. Do you learn anything? No.
You learn through explaining and understanding, then applying it yourself until you reach the "aha" moment -and then extrapolate and be able to "solve" similar math problems and equations. Same applies for poker.
Truly learning poker can be through a friend, coach, a course, or whatever.
Let’s address the elephant in the room right away:
“oF cOuRsE hE sAyS tHaT BeCaUsE hE iS seLLiNg yOu a cOuRsE!”
I don’t fucking care who is doing the job. Whether you sign up for an Upswing course, you learn through my YouTube videos, or you get a good coach somewhere else.
My goal is for you to understand that learning a complex game like poker is done by UNDERSTANDING its mechanics – the reasons why we open-raise certain hands, why we 3-bet certain hands, why we bluff certain hands. And most of you are mindlessly scrolling through one sim after another believing you are making progress. No, you are not.
You grind one solver sim after another, even neglecting your opponent’s strategy – whether it is realistic or not.
I mean, how can you? You don’t have the experience and knowledge to assess whether your opponents GTO strategy is realistic or not.
Having someone explain to you how the GTO strategy can be implemented REALISTICALLY is extremely powerful.
In certain spots you simply never want to bluff, and in certain spots you can go absolutely ballistic because the runout favours you and your opponent needs to bluffcatch many weak hands.
But in the other spot, your opponent needs to fold a lot of top pairs — which they never will — therefore you don’t need to bluff.
(That’s why we created a separate “EXPLOITATIVE” Section in ICM Pairrd, where you get to see scenarios on final tables where we altered ranges for players being too loose and too tight, and see the impact on our strategy. Often a small deviation leads to a MASSIVE impact on our strategy.)
Most of you play on Micro, Low, and Midstakes.
Often playing in casinos, against very bad players – and as preparation, you are going through some GTO sims.
The advice “You don’t need GTO” is kind of accurate for these games, BUT looking into some of these GTO sims and seeing a spot where your opponent is supposed to fold a lot of top pairs against a 3-barrel to make your bluff somewhat profitable can be helpful and very eye opening. Seeing the EV/money you are torching in these spots vs bad players can save you A TON of money in similar spots.
Someone showing you that if you alter the range and your opponent is calling more top pairs than he should – that all of your bluffs will be -EV and all you do is value betting (So here, pairing GTO + realistic analysis is super helpful).
That’s the kind of approach that will turn you into an excellent poker player. To use your brain when using a solver, or having someone who has that brain explain it to you – so soon enough, you can do it yourself.
Going for that 3-barrel bluff against CasinoJoe, who calls you down with second pair for 100bb, and you ranting why those idiots don’t fold to your sophisticated bluffs. Who’s the real idiot?
And these spots happen en masse.
I am selling a course because I believe through this medium it is the most powerful way to learn the game. That’s why we never created a solver.
We had multiple opportunities to acquire solvers or create our own version, even in the early days of RaiseYourEdge.
And I follow this exact same approach now for 10+ years. And it works. Across all stakes (as you might have seen).
This approach also makes me easier to attack. So many of my plays are not "solver approved", but they fill my wallet. That's what matters.
Do you want a great solver score, or a bigger bankroll?
The Solver won't fill your wallet, the solver is a tool to understand theory and develop exploits that when used correctly will fill your wallet.
I see solvers similar to your first driving lessons. You should have someone helping you (a proven winning player) to put the solver outputs into context – showing you how you can get the most out of the solver.
Someone who can tell you which of the ranges/strategies shown in the solver are useful, which are not, and which exploits you can make – and how you can interpret your opponent’s range.
And then slowly transition into using it on your own.
As a new player, jumping right into grinding solvers on your own? Not a good idea.
And that’s where I would say, it will do more bad than good to your game.
You can also go through solver stuff and then post questions/ask for feedback/help — i.e., in our Discord (which is free).
The point is: use your brain when using these tools. At the end of the day, you play vs humans – a lot of them are very bad at poker. So always make sure that every sim you look up, you look at it through the lens of playing vs humans, and the potential mistakes they make at the tables, and how you can exploit it.
Using a solver paired with someone experienced can be very powerful. Or learning it through videos where someone is explaining the outputs and putting them in the right context and providing realistic strategies is also a very good way.
From my experience, this is one of the most reliable ways to become really, really good at poker.
It is no different to anything else in life, Theory often helps us to understand the basics, but we need additional input/context and then apply them properly in real life to really crush.
If you found value, I would appreciate a retweet.
