Is GTO Necessary???

yes

It's really impossible to answer this for a number of reasons.

One, we have no idea how much volume you're putting in, so that's one way we have no idea if your results are just variance or not.

Two, you don't give us any hands or situations you've played to evaluate, so we have no idea how you play generally or how you are playing spots specifically. Your description of your strategy is as generic as can be. Heck, so is your description of your results. We don't know what stakes you're playing or what your ROI is or was.

I will say, though, that if you aren't working on modernizing your game and getting better, you're falling behind. Those Harrington books are almost 20 years old by now. If you're still following their strategies, then while there is quite useful information in them for their time (particularly how to adjust your hand ranges based on your stack depth), your game is definitely out of date.

I play aprox 3-4 MTT’s per month, buy-ins aprox $50-$150. Usually levels are aprox 20min long and starting chips stacks are anywhere from 50-100bb.

Players range from very bad to very good, and everything in between.

Lots of open limping, c-betting, and donk betting. I’ve been guilty of this type of play as well.

Trying to play GTO isnt going to help you much in these types of games, other than removing some serious blunders you probably make... however learning GTO will help you better understand your opponent's mistakes which will help you play better against them.

No you need to be concerned with how to exploit your opponents. In low-mid stake tournaments there's a lot of bad players and marginal winners who are highly exploitable - you need to figure out how to target these players and not be exploited by the better players. Also when you do accumulate a big stack down the stretch you need to figure out the ability to close - play less tournaments at a time and focus on where to exploit/improve.

You should not be trying to play GTO, as your opponents are making mountains of exploitable mistakes. However, being able to take advantage of these mistakes requires a knowledge of what and why GTO is what it is.

So yes, you should study/understand it, but your goal should be knowledge and understanding, not to play like a GTObot.

With this small montly volume you haven't played more than about 150-200 tourneys the last 3-4 years. It's hard to draw conclusions from such a small sample. It could be a downswing. Or it could be you were luckier earlier. Especially if you play bigger MTT:s with say at least 400-500 players or more.

And remember that all players bust the vast majority of the tourneys they play, no matter how good they are. That's just the nature of the game.

What I can say from my experience (mostly lowstakes player who returned to the games last christmas after nearly a decade away) is that even lowstakes has become tougher. On a typical say $11 BI table 80-90% of the players have a VPIP/PFR on around say 21/17 +- say 7. There are some limpers still, but most of them don't play horrible numbers like 75/4.

That doesn't mean players are very good (including myself). But they surely aren't very bad. And most people don't call down that lightly with marginal holdings as they once did. Which makes it harder to build stacks by just playing basic ABC-poker.

Basically both of these. I think it's important to learn GTO strategies as a baseline, and will be more important to you to stick to if you move up or play tougher competition. But for the games you're playing, it's more important that you learn them so you can better understand not only what is theoretically correct, but the mistakes your opponents are making and how you should be deviating from GTO play to exploit those mistakes.

So it seems like everyone agrees that its important to learn and be very familiar with GTO opening ranges as well as GTO post-flop strategy…..even at these stakes….but only because its the best way to truly see the holes in people’s game and be able to exploit them fully.

Is this correct?

I wasn’t aware that you had to know GTO to be able to exploit players, I thought one had nothing to do with the other.

One good example is the GTO-based preflop charts you can find in various places on the net. If you gain information that a player opens to wide or to tight from a position you can make an exploit by either calling/3-betting more (if they open to wide) or folding more (if they open to tight) than you normally should have done.

The GTo-based ranges serve as a base for what is a fundamentally solid strategy from which you deviate in order to exploit mistakes people do when they play too loose or too tight

Thanks everyone for the replies….this helped so much!

I really appreciate it, helped clear this up for me and will change what I’m studying!