How to exploit under raising big hands pre

Their error is more an error of suboptimality than it is exploitability. The "O" in GTO is high-key the most underrated letter in the acronym. Someone could open fold every hand UTG and be perfectly balanced; the reason sims are more elaborate than that is because they are trying to maximize gains.

In this case, your opponents are losing value by not reraising you, but having those hands in their range will still make your equity and realization go down in single raised pots.

You can look at it like you're "exploiting" them through reciprocality, where you're earning more EV when you have nutted hands than they are, but apart from the fact that you're losing less money against them when they're nutted, you're worse off in every other way.

This is all assuming they are not 3betting light in general. If they have a 10% 3bet without having those hands in their range, obviously their 3bet strategy is exploitable.

Actually the “O” in GTO is the most overrated part of the acronym. GTO is NOT optimal in most realistic situations. GTO is an equilibrium reached when two players start with an arbitrary strategy and continually adjust that strategy so as to improve their EV against their opponent’s current strategy. An equilibrium state will eventually be reached where no further adjustments can increase EV — this is the Nash Equilibrium (a far better name than the more common GTO).

Use the rock/paper/scissors game as an example. ItÂ’s well known that the NE for RPS is to play each option randomly with probability 1/3. This strategy will win 1/3 of the time and push 1/3 of the time regardless of what your opponent does. ThatÂ’s what makes it the GTO strategy; your opponent can do nothing to change how often you win.

Does this make it optimal? No - it is optimal only if your opponent plays the same strategy. Suppose you are playing RPS against Bart Simpson. Bart always chooses rock (“Good old rock!”😉. Assuming we know BartÂ’s strategy, itÂ’s easy to find a strategy better than GTO, and optimal strategy is to always play paper, winning all the time rather than 1/3.

The same applies to poker. Our optimal strategy is to exploit deviations from GTO, not to simply play GTO. In OPs example, our opponent is actually exploiting himself. He fails to maximize his EV for the top of his range. If he never 3 bets we can further exploit by opening wider (don’t have to worry about folding marginal hands PF because of a potential 3 bet). If he does 3 bet but flats premiums we can further exploit by 4 betting lighter — he has capped his 3 bet range by removing premium hands.

Depending on how he plays post flop, we also can find exploits. If he flats PF then check raises when OOP or raises when IP vs our cbets with his premiums, for instance, we can over fold to those raises. If he simply flats our cbets we can exploit by playing more speculative drawing hands and cash in via implied odds when we hit those draws.

As much as I appreciate you ELI5ing the concept of GTO to me, I don't think you've disproven much of what I've said or provided OP much helpful insight

The RPS analogy is great for understanding delicate spots where balance is very important, like where the indifference principle is at play. A single percentage point of {over- / under-} {bluffing / bluff catching} completely breaks a strategy and allows you to exploit them by (always / never) (bluffing / bluff-catching), quite like in RPS. My point was to illustrate that this is decidedly unlike that.

The dynamics of playing against someone whose range includes more preflop monsters will be fundamentally similar to perfectly theoretical scenarios like, say, if they cold call or you use an especially large raise size or if they were the one who raised preflop in the first place.

You shrewdly pointed out that their lack of 3bs makes us slightly overrealize, which allows us to open a little wider in front of them. (Though having one player left-to-act allow us to realize a fraction of our already low equity against the strongest fraction of their range won't be enough to, say, turn all your mixes into pure VPIPs).

Apart from that, there are not many decisions where your EV goes up. In fact, the reason that your strategy changes is because the EV of most of your decisions are going to be lower, thus making folding and checking more often the highest EV decision.

Whether it is an exploit because you are playing your opponent as if it is a different configuration is a somewhat semantic argument that my linguistics-loving ass would be happy to have, but I don't think would be particularly fruitful for OP.

(I will say it is my fault for opening the pandoras box of semantics by opening this thread by saying something's "underrated").

Of course, all of this is specifically addressing ways to make direct exploits against specifically their lack of preflop aggression with value hands. Obviously these players are fish and will have any number of pre- and postflop exploitabilities that make GTO play against them wildly suboptimal. If any part of any of my posts implied otherwise, then you and I both agree those implications are flat-out wrong.

I’m defining “exploit” as a deviation from the Nash Equilibrium strategy for the intended purpose of increasing our EV. This, by definition, will only work if our opponent is also deviating from NE strategy. If he is playing NE, then nothing we do can increase our EV. By that definition, opening a wider range than standard against an opponent who doesn’t three bet is an exploit. If you don’t want to call it that, fine, I’m not going to argue semantics.

Practical exploit: Just open wider. Many hands in your range are afraid of opening because they might face a 3-bet. If that's not happening enough, then you get to play more hands and see more flops.

Yeah pretty much just see more flops cheap and bomb it when you smash. If they’re slowplaying big pairs, you just tax the hell out of them after.