alt Hacker News> This is provably false.
Where is the proof?
> You're absolutely right that GTO does not guarantee you'll win the maximum against a fish, but neither does exploitative play. In fact, exploitative play can't guarantee you anything, which is probably why old-school pro players are perennially going broke throughout their careers (that and bad bankroll management).
I'm not arguing in favor of one or the other, I am just correcting the misunderstanding. In reality, you should adapt to the conditions at the table and your opponents habits, because "GTO" is only possible against perfect play to begin with, so you're always going to be playing slightly imperfectly. so is everyone, because you cannot know everything. And again, it's almost never the way to win the most money. It's a distinction not a lot of GTO nerds understand. I'm not arguing against it at all - I use GTO solvers to work on stuff a lot.
And I also never claimed exploitative strategies guarantee everything, for the same reason "GTO" doesn't either. It's a game of incomplete information. The skill comes in using incomplete information in making good assumptions - that is almost nothing to do with math. And, there are pros that have been winning for long amounts of time knowing zero about GTO theory.
Replies
> Where is the proof?
von Neuman proved it for 2 players in his classic "Theory of Games and Economic Behavior": https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.215284/page/n3...
Nash proved it for n-players: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1063129/pdf/pnas015...
> "GTO" is only possible against perfect play to begin with
This is a very common misconception, probably because GTO is usually explained as the equilibrium reached by 2 perfect players. The key insight of GTO is that you do not adjust your strategy to what your opponent is doing. If you play the equilibrium strategy and they don't, you're guaranteed to make money.
> And I also never claimed exploitative strategies guarantee everything, for the same reason "GTO" doesn't either. It's a game of incomplete information.
I didn't say you did, I was just making my own independent argument as to why intuitive play is dangerous and people often end up deceiving themselves into thinking they're winning players.
> And, there are pros that have been winning for long amounts of time knowing zero about GTO theory.
Which is why I said that, IMO, 90% of pro players fundamentally misunderstand poker (and that's not even counting the losing players who think they're "pro").
There is an entire area of math about the uncertainty of decision correctness in incomplete information scenarios. One of the neat aspects of it is that all computable optimal decision makers are mechanically exploitable if you have a reasonably accurate model of their finiteness. In the case of human minds, that just means they are a lot like you. The exploits require iterated games and are cognitively difficult (you have to track a lot of state).
Anecdotally, in my poker playing days I had a lot of success by attacking quasi-optimal play this way. Optimality is contextual. You can engineer a context that motivates suboptimal decisions in fact, though it isn’t easy.
However, at the limit, this is really just attacking the cognitive facilities of your opponents rather than the math of the game. Someone that with a similar ability to manipulate large amounts of state mentally could nullify the advantage. It is meta-games all the way down.