GTO question regarding profitability

You need to learn GTO in order to recognize opponents deviations from it and to be able to exploit those deviations. If you don’t know what the GTO strategy is in a given spot, how are you going to recognize when your opponents aren’t using it? If you try to “exploit” an opponent who is actually playing something close to GTO poker, it’s not likely to go well for you. Further, if the player you think you are exploiting recognizes that you are playing a deviating strategy, he can make it even worse by actually exploiting you.

GTO knowledge is useful not because we want to play that strategy exactly and robotically. It’s a baseline strategy that we want to generally deviate from in small ways to exploit opponents. Nobody actually plays GTO poker, especially since only approximations to the strategy are available. Knowing the strategy as well as possible is helpful, though, especially in cases where we don’t have solid reads on opponents.

Of course you want to play against fish who have no knowledge of GTO and play strategies that are far from it. But you need to understand exactly what deviations they are making to maximize your ability to profit and you must be able to play something close to GTO to defend yourself from being exploited by the good players in your games

If your opponent plays perfect GTO, you should do so as well and obv both loose to the rake. If your opponent deviates from GTO, the knowledge of GTO opens you the door to exploitation. It's basically shield and sword.

If you're referring specifically to preflop, then you should be using rake-adjusted charts. That way you have a baseline of which hands are profitable to play in a given spot, assuming your opponents are playing well.

You still can and should be adjusting to exploit your opponents' mistakes. If you know you're supposed to be folding AJo in the big blind when faced with an UTG raise from a GTO opponent, you might still decide it's profitable to defend against your non-GTO opponent. It's one pip wider than GTO is defending, and if your opponent makes some big mistakes postflop then calling with AJo could easily be justifiable. However if you're thinking about calling with A7o, you better have a solid reason because it's so far off from baseline that it's going to be difficult to overcome the rake, range and positional disadvantages even against a weaker opponent.

Hello, Yeah, your logic actually makes sense, and a lot of good players think about it in a similar way. You’re right that if two players play perfect GTO, rake makes the game losing for both, and the real money comes from exploiting mistakes. So in practice, pure GTO vs real opponents isn’t the goal.

The key point is that GTO isn’t really meant to be played “as is” all the time. It’s more of a baseline. It shows you what your strategy looks like when it can’t be exploited, and from there you can start deviating when you see leaks. Without that baseline, it’s very easy to over-adjust and create new leaks in your own game.

So the idea is not “play GTO always”, but rather:
have a solid, balanced foundation and then exploit where it’s profitable. The better you understand GTO, the better you understand where and how much you can deviate.

This is actually something we work on a lot in our analysis. Not just showing solver outputs, but translating them into practical adjustments against real player pools and specific opponents. Finding where people overfold, overcall, underbluff, and then building exploits on top of a solid baseline.

You can check some examples and feedback here:
https://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/290/c...

If you want, we can look at your database and show exactly where population deviates from GTO in your games and how to exploit it. First look is free.

Good answer GW
This is why I’m mostly FoR (fold or raise)
Calling is not good - fold to 3bets (unlike the population) - don’t cold call

Playing speculative hands is usually a mistake. There are times that it makes sense, but some play every SC, every Axs, every small pair even when raised.

GTO is never useless as knowledge is power

But the rake is why you can’t play OOP and must be overall tighter than most people ever imagine.

More important:
1. So many beats are really leaks - you play A7, the flop comes J77, you can’t fold now and JJ takes your stack. You whine about the beat, but you got into a g-n fight with a pocket kn-fe
2. It’s very hard to fold correctly. Most people simply can’t do it. The natural tendency is you want to get in there and play.
3. Honestly, GTO charts are often too wide for low stakes and will have you defending hands that have no business mixing it up with many of the cautious players out there.
4. You act like it’s so easy to spot, but I don’t see GTO players - I see humans making mistakes. The mistakes are there, you just have to find them.

The way I think about it is GTO gives you a floor, exploits give you a ceiling. Against unknowns you play closer to GTO, against players you have reads on you deviate. The tricky part is knowing when your reads are actually good enough to justify the deviation.