GTO Wizard for Live No-Limit Players

Why did you spend money on it without knowing what it is?

I have similar misgivings although I've only trialled the free version a few times. The emphasis on (a) 6max (b) small raise sizings (c) HU pots (d) 100bb stacks and (e) GTO proficient opponents has led me to avoid forking out the cash for a subscription, even though I have been tempted. I understand your frustration and obviously you understand that you can adapt solvers to live play by node locking etc., but there are others who could tell you more about doing so. I guess the difference between a solver and a GTO trainer is relevant and maybe the trainer is a useful primer for more nuanced solver work. The issue of how to best use your time and resources is relevant too, that is, whether money is better spent on coaching, a subscription to a curated course, or just adding it your bankroll and playing bigger games.

It's worth it if you're willing to put in the effort. It helps if you find it all really interesting. You can get the elite version if you want to and experiment more with ranges and nodelocking using the AI.

Yes, multiway cannot be simmed currently, but that is supposedly going to be implemented eventually.

Yes, it is hard to simulate some live configurations, like when recs limp, people limp behind, and someone isos.

There is still a ton of knowledge that can be gained studying heads up spots and preflop spots. Understanding GTO helps you understand what the baseline is. You have to make observations about your player pool and individual players to figure out where they are deviating from GTO and hoe to exploit them. For example, are they massively overfolding flop, not continuing near as wide as GTO? Are they massively underbluffing, missing a bunch of weird GTO bluffs? Are they folding too many flops and turns to call river too much?

Solvers are absolutely incredible tools that have made players advance much further in skill than we ever could have without solvers. You are almost certainly going to be a disadvantage against a player who had done significant silver work. That said, if you have the attitude that it's not going to help you and you don't have a natural wonder in learning what the GTO strategy is, I don't think GTO Wizard is going to be very helpful to you.

It doesnt blindly give you information, and yoyre right that following some of its advice would lose you money, but a TON can be gleaned off it, but its not so easy to explain why in a short amount of time if you dont naturally know.

Like, just to give an exampld if GTO says its the correct move to bet a backdoor straight draw + backdoor flush draw on some flop board texture, and then overbet turn when you pick up a gutshot, and you look at how GTO responds and you think “there’s no way my opponent is calling 2 streets this wide”, then thats an incredibly valuable bluffing spot, because it means the typical opponent is overfolding, which means bluffs will generate a ton of value.

I also think it should be able to teach you how to play 3 bet pots as the 3 bettor, where its much more often HU, and where most players are making huge mistakes.

The other thing ill say is the price tag just isnt necessarily worth it for the vast majority of players unless you just think learning about poker is fun. If you play like 25 hours a month, i dont know that its gonna increase the typical player’s expected winrate by $4/hr.

This was long part of standard play even before solvers came out. You have to protect your check range with some top pairs. Having a kicker higher than the other cards on the board is better for checking with than having a kicker lower than the other cards on the board, because you turn/river better two pairs and if you turn/river trips you stack other trips almost all of the time. Obviously this isn't a 100% frequency play, but if you're always betting TPTK+ and checking worse you're playing face up.

Thank you for your opinion. Because I play only 10 hrs per month at low stakes, in the short run, from a financial perspective, paying for GTO Wizard is probably a huge leak costing $8.90/hr. As MLark says, it may very well be better to put the 89 dollars into my bankroll.

On the other hand, my goal is to play better and without going broke. Invest now for another 30 years of poker or until my brain inevitably atrophies. In the long run, learning to play just these two you list spots correctly is worth a one-month subscription.

use it to study poker theory. look for patterns, change variables and see what changes (board texture, sizing, spr, positions, preflop solves), understand which run outs are better for players in different lines and see what the implications are of that on strategy. when you look at a hand look at both sides, not just the particular spot you are clueless in. you want to understand major concepts as opposed to getting answers in once off situations. if you don't understand the solver output, take the time to post one complete with ss and whatever questions you have, and people will help you.

i think if you're looking for decent bang on ur buck for a small investment you are likely going to be better off watching some kind of video series that gives a brief synopsis of all of the major nodes or at least poker theory as opposed to jumping into a bunch of presolves. i suggested this to someone else on here but galfond has a beginner nl series on run it once - foundations that is likely very good. i've only watched his plo content but he's one of the best teachers in the space.

the issue too with something like Gtow is the onus is entirely on you to make it worth it, because its a recurring cost. i'll ignore the hourly of a month of playing as i think that's kind of a flawed way to look at it, but it's going to make sense if you can get something like 10+ study hours a week out of the content imo. if you find a way to get in hands online at very low stakes and record the hh's - probably something like acr, and review them / look in gtow, the investment should mostly pay for itself very quickly in terms of poker hourly in the medium term, as well as the ability to move up in stakes. also you're pretty clearly passionate about the game to have posted here for 10+ years and 1000 times, so like you might as well try to get good at it.

The issue is that gto isnt really something you learn or can implement in a month exactly. Itll likely take you weeks just to start getting an even rudimentary gauge on wtf youre even looking at. And when you do start to understand, there are certain things that need to be understood as a whole. For example, the first time i dipped my toes into GTO, i learned about the much smaller 33% bet sizings on the flop, and i tried to implement this strategy without learning that its supposed to be followed up with a lot of turn overbet double barrels, and it was a disaster. Beyond that, it has a certain addicting quality. I had it for like 2 months, cancelled, and came crawling back a few months later and in not sure ill ever stop paying for it, cuz i enjoy it.

Low stakes games are so exploitable that you'd be close to nuts to follow GTO very closely (unless you somehow have a bunch of players who are really good).

As for learning, I find the tools/charts not overly useful. Nobody knows on the fly that they should be 3-betting K4s at a 50% frequency, but folding K6s 100%.

What is useful is there are some good books that talk more at the conceptual level, and those may be a better choice for you.

Adonson, you might be interested in browsing this thread although it relates to PLO (be warned: there's a few derails): https://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/38/om...

I don't use a solver or trainer and play full-time but I still believe what Mlark, Tomark and submersible say is definitely worth considering. They're most likely seeing bluffing spots and value lines I don't see. I mean, we all want a bigger edge right?

The reason I don't use a solver is mostly related to efficiency of study time but also other more situational issues. I looked seriously at buying Monkersolver when I was playing mostly PLO around 2018. I had been using Propoker Tools to analyse hands and a solver seemed a logical progression; unfortunately then it was (a) expensive (b) required a computer with at least 32 RAM and (c) more time costly to learn how to use. Instead I spent the money on a 40 hour course that was heavily based on Monker sims and curated by someone who'd established how to calibrate GTO ranges to different postflop scenarios. I literally watched that course three times over the course of a year and probably benefited more from it than I would had I run the sims by myself in an unstructured way.

However, if I had spent the 1k on Monker then rather the subscription course, I'd probably be running sims today rather applying concepts from various courses/free youtube/2+2/podcasts etc to analyse hands. If I was playing games where I knew the better regs were using solvers in a productive and nuanced way, I'd probably be more inclined to devote time and resources to them, but the games I'm playing aren't that reg-heavy atm. I mean, I can often tell when some players have used trainers and are playing what roughly equate to GTO ranges (even though we're 9- not 6- handed ) but they seem to be small winners/break-even rather than crushing.

The reality is that those who are using solvers and/or trainers effectively are likely playing higher than 1/3. But even if you're only playing 10 hours a month but still interested in the technical side of the game it's probably worth pursuing the solver path, even if at snail's pace, because at some stage you may want to play more hours and bigger games. I mean, tbh, I should probably be on GTO Wizard now rather than writing this post.

I'm glad I diverted you from your homework.

The nice visuals in GTO Wizard are opponents one never sees, ever, live. Having it on your cell phone is of course a plus. I told myself: all the pros subscribe to Elite. Shall I spew $60 for the Elite version for solves to the flop? I'll let you know if I forget to cancel my subscription. GTO seems more like a defensive strategy against pros than an exploit of loose passives.

I'm into the 2nd month of the lowest tier subscription. I view it less as "coaching" and more as a really nice convenience to have when I have a question, even though the functionality for basic, low limit, multiway pots is meh.

Although I can well afford the top tier plan, it just feels weird to spend close to $1700/yr on a subscription as a 1-3 rec who plays maybe 40 hours per month.

GTO Wizard will only help you conceptually for live poker. But GTO Wizard is about reg concepts and most of your opponents are fish when you play live.

If you want to use online tools to help you with live play use MDA but still understand an online fish is much more aggressive than a live fish in general.

Throw out a 25% pot c-bet in live poker and let me know how many folds you get

yeah let's judge a bet meant to keep an opponent's range wide going into the turn by how many folds it gets

I genuinely screwed up my game for a long time trying out this bet size (33% actually), so i get it. It takes one of our most powerful tools in that Vs overfold to a 2/3 pot cbets and it instead encourages them to call wide, which on its own probably causes the low stakes fish to play closer to correct on the flop. You simply cannot implement a 33% flop bet size without coupling it with knowing how to implement turn overbets on blanks, and how to bet and how often you should be bluffing the river.

It definitely isnt a strategy that improves your game in a vacuum, youre basically taking advantage of their tendency to overfold in different parts of the decision tree.

If they are folding 20% of the time you are already breaking even. Above that and you are profiting. If you are cbetting 1/3 pot you only need 25% folds. It's a common misconception that it is only profitable if you know how to barrel turns. There are so many spots like on K72r where the out of position player is supposed to continue with 98, T9, JT, QJ, 65, 54 witha back door flush draw, and a decent amount of the time witb no backdoor flush draw, and solver is STILL folding way more than 20%-25%. Live players also aren't check raising you near enough, as many of the hands above will either check call or check raise flop.

The thing about small bets with range is that even if they don't get folds most of the time, they can still be profitable.

Just don't do it on every board and don't automatically do it multiway either.

On an average 5 player flop after a single PF raise, a bet of <25% is generally enough to get at least 2-3 folds, since even optimistic PF fish realize on the flop their odds of now winning with their crap has gone way down.

I don't actually know because I don't use a solver (although I read/watch a lot of stuff by people who do) but should we be c-betting 1/3 pot as PFR OOP 4 ways on K72? Heads up it's a no brainer and 3 way could be ok, but has this spot actually been solved at 100bb for > than 3 way? I'm pretty confident we should be checking without significant equity but my "intelligence" in this regard is far from definitive.

Not being disingenuous but I think the conversation has evolved because we're talking about a practical application of a common GTO solution to live poker. The gist is that many are suggesting much of what GTO Wizard advocates doesn't easily fit with a typical live low stakes game. The small cbet/turn overbet example is probably the best way of assessing whether Wizard is worth the subscription fee.

As a relevant aside, I listened to Marc Goone on Thinking Poker yesterday (a podcast sponsored by GTO Wizard) and he said that if you're not earning a triple-figure hourly from poker then you're wasting your time using a solver. To me that says a lot, not least because he teaches the small cbet/turn and river overbet strategy in his videos.

This is because sizing changes tend to be the very first thing people notice from GTO, so it tends to be the argument against it by people who briefly looked into it and decided it wasnt worth investigating further.

It only raises 2-3x preflop, it goes 4.5x+ as a 3 bet OOP preflop. The most common flop sizing gto uses is 33%. And then on the turn, it tends to use 75% for a dynamic turn size and 133% for a blank. And then on the river it uses a massive range of bets, as much as 10x+ pot AI in some spots. All of these are wildly different than how a typical player sizes their bets.

A lot of players who have this as their first takeaway (at least somewhat correctly) surmise that these sizings wont work well at live poker, which they (myself included when i first started looking into GTO) see as damning evidence that GTO isnt relevant to live poker. Even the most ardent GTO followers tend to raise 2.5x-3x preflop from EP not 2x in live poker.

Its actually a perfect example of what i was saying before, which is GTO doesnt exactly give you the answers, and blindly following lessons you learn from it will likely make your game worse. if you could magically play perfect GTO tomorrow it would obviously make your game better, but nobody can, much less someone who is first starting off, and piecemeal adding of gto principals will at least sometimes just hurt you.

Disclaimer: I am no game theory expert, so please do not take what follows for granted.

The computational effort for multiway simulations increases exponentially, therefore it is not so obvious that a reasonably comprehensive multiway solver will come out anytime soon. For instance, as far as I have understood, already in the available solvers, the absence of a preflop calling range in most positions (all but btn and bb) is an approximation, needed to keep the simulation complexity at bay.

On a more fundamental level, I am wondering if the "existence and uniqueness" of a GTO solution for multiway games has been demonstrated at all.