Advanced Poker Strategies: Understanding Exploitative and GTO Poker
While basic strategies like ABC poker will work when you’re new, if you want to play like the pros, you have to use an advanced poker strategy. And when it comes to advanced playstyles, two types of play dominate – GTO and exploitative. In this guide, we’ll be looking at exactly what they offer, and how you can use them to take your game to the next level.
Keep in mind this is a guide meant for advanced players and will assume you already know the basics. If you’re new to poker, we recommend you check out these 8 Poker Strategy Tips.
Exploitative and GTO Poker Meaning
GTO, which stands for ‘Game Theory Optimal,’ is a type of strategy that can be applied to a lot of different games. Players applying it seek to create a mathematically balanced style of play that is unexploitable. A great example of this can be seen through the Cepheus Poker Project – a bot that has solved Limit Heads Up Texas Hold’em by creating the perfect GTO strategy.
Of course, real players are not robots – and they’re seldom perfect. And it’s this exact fact that exploitative poker looks to take advantage of. With exploitative poker, you’re looking to benefit from a player’s faults by modifying your own style of play to focus on their weakness. A basic example would be that if you’re at a table, and you notice that a certain player isn’t defending their blinds enough, you start to raise their blinds more often than you normally would.
How to Use Exploitative and GTO Poker Strategy in Different Areas
Rather than looking at GTO and exploitative poker as competing strategies, you should look at them as two tools in a good player’s arsenal and should seek to understand and implement them both in your game. For that reason, we’ll be looking at common situations and how you can approach them from a GTO and exploitative point of view.
Using GTO Preflop
Preflop is one of the areas where GTO is absolutely essential. How you play preflop can largely determine how the rest of the hand is going to play out and how much you stand to win; for that reason, it’s crucial to master this phase of play. Fortunately, preflop is also one of the easiest phases to prepare for.
An example of preflop hands charts
You won’t need to bust GTO calculators here – instead, just making up a couple of preflop hands charts like the ones above will be enough. Though, if you really want to have your bases covered, we recommend making one for each position and including plans for how to deal with different situations like 3-bets and unusually high bets.
How Exploitative Strategy Deals with Preflop
When it comes to preflop, you only want to be thinking about using an exploitative advanced poker strategy in very specific situations. If you’re in the cutoff, dealer, or small blind positions and notice that the big blind isn’t defending enough, you can add in a couple of extra hands to bet with. Likewise, if you’re in one of the blinds and are up against a bet from a particularly active player, you can usually throw in a few more 3-bets.
An exploitative preflop style of play is best used in offline poker when playing at a physical casino, as you’re more likely to be facing players that limp into a pot a lot.
Using GTO For C-Bets
Even advanced players tend to make a lot of mistakes in C-betting. This does make it ripe for exploitation, but it also can be an area where you can get exploited very easily if you’re not careful. For that reason, knowing when to C-bet, when to check, and when to challenge a C-bet with a raise is one of the first things you should be looking into. It is this scenario where some off-table studying with poker solvers will do no harm.
Phil Galfond does a good job at quickly explaining how poker solvers work:
How Exploitative Strategy Deals with C-Bets
As mentioned above, C-betting is an area where you should be on the lookout for potential exploitation situations. In both live and online poker, many players will either fold too often to the slightest aggression when out of position, or will C-bet when in position close to 100% of the time. Knowing this, you can three-bet with marginal hands to induce a large amount of folds. Or, when in position, you can adjust your strategy to check more when you’re strong on a dry board, and bet little when weak to force folds.
Using GTO With Strong Hands
Against skilled players, using a GTO balanced betting and raising strategy is crucial to ensuring that your range is obscured and that you end up winning big. With it, whenever you’re strong you should use a randomisation strategy to determine when to do a small raise, a normal raise, or an over-bet. Exactly how often you should do each of these will depend on your situation. And the only way to know this information is to enter the details of a hand into a poker solver once you’re off the tablem and then try and remember the relevant information next time you’re in that situation.
How Exploitative Strategy Deals with Strong Hands
An exploitative playstyle works great against weak players when you’re strong – but trying it against skilled players is itself an easy way to get exploited. So while you can bet high against a calling station when the opportunity presents itself, it’s essential that you still research a balanced strategy for when you’re playing against unknown or skilled players.
Using GTO With Marginal Hands
There’s arguably no area that GTO excels more in than when you have a marginal hand. Over-bluffing, over-calling, and over-folding are all extremely common depending on the type of player – though with a GTO poker strategy, you’ll be able to know exactly how often you should be doing each of these. While nothing beats off the table studying for this situation, if you find yourself facing a bet against an unknown player when you have a marginal hand, you can work out a minimum defence frequency.
The equation for minimum defence is simple:
pot size / (pot size + bet size).
How Exploitative Strategy Deals with Marginal Hands
GTO almost always trumps exploitation when you have a marginal hand. This is especially true when playing at an online casino where players are typically better. However, there are still a handful of cases where you may come up against a player who is either easy to bluff or has a tendency to only ever bet when they are very strong. And in these situations, you shouldn’t shy away from adjusting your playstyle to take advantage of them.
We’ll summarize the pros & cons of both a GTO and Exploitative poker strategy below.
GTO Poker Pros & Cons
- Pros
- Unexploitable
- Perfect to build on from basic ABC strategy
- Works against the best players
- Doesn’t rely on the ‘psychological’ side of poker
- Poker software analyses hands and scenarios
- Cons
- Requires a lot of off-table studying
- Treating rookies like pros will limit profit
Exploitative Poker Pros & Cons
- Pros
- Exploiting weaker players can lead to huge profits
- Less studying is required as you can rely on your gut instinct more often
- Encourages overall more diverting poker
- Maths is less important
- Great when playing against players you’re familiar with
- Cons
- Can itself be exploited
- More difficult to multi table
- Will be playing blind against unknown players
To Sum Up
While it can be easier to master a single strategy, the mark of a great player is being able to switch between playstyles depending on the situation they’re in. And by understanding both GTO and exploitative poker strategy, you’ll have two that complement each other perfectly. GTO will make you competitive against the best players, while exploitative poker will allow you to win as big a pot as possible against weaker players.
If you think you’re ready to test yourself against real players, check out the Best Poker Live Casino Sites in the UK.
References
- B. Dan. “How to make the most profitable decision against any bet size,” Upswing Poker, August 3, 2018, https://upswingpoker.com/minimum-defense-frequency-vs-pot-odds/. Accessed September 17, 2024.
- Galfond, Phil. “Poker Solver Explained — GTO Poker Strategy,” YouTube, June 19, 2023, https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Jz2zgO3vucg. Accessed September 17, 2024.
- “GTO poker 101: Master game theory optimal implications,” Pokercode, August 24, 2022, https://www.pokercode.com/blog/gto-poker. Accessed September 17, 2024.
- Sweeney, James. “Exploitative poker 101,” Red Chip Poker, May 23, 2019, https://redchippoker.com/exploitative-poker-101/. Accessed September 17, 2024.
