Is GTO Not Optimal After All?

“G” for “A Game” but Not “The Game”

In his January 2025 video on YouTube GTO is NOT the true optimal way of playing poker…, Dan “Jungleman” Cates explains how GTO works in just a few simple words:

“GTO is a balance of opposites. It’s a balance between aggression / lack of aggression also of folding or not folding so much and you can see all these ideas are related. And if both players perfectly exploit each other — they lead to GTO.

But people don’t start off anywhere near GTO in all kinds of situations, it’s very hard to. And with enough experience or the right data you can have population reads on how people play.”

So Dan divides players into four types:

1. Normal recreational players.
2. Abnormal recreational players, or “the crazy ones”. They’re usually very crazy and bluff too much.
3. Normal professionals.
4. Abnormal professionals, or “the crazy pros”. They have the same tendencies reflected but now they kind of know what they’re doing and have some basics behind their belt.

You can’t outplay any of them just by relying on GTO — as Dan expounds, you need to be more observant and creative in your approach:

“My general play at least from the start goes into exploiting these two subsets as much as I can until I see more information that tells me a bit about how precisely they play, in which case I adjust my view and my way of exploiting them, and I tailor it to what these players do.”

You see: to be a winning player, you should be able to beat each unique game you are playing but not any typical game. And for doing so you should watch your opponents closely and pick up info from their play at any given moment.

In live poker you can get lots of clues from how your oponants talk, how they dress, what sort of person they are, where they’re going to lay on, etc.

In online poker you can notice patterns in their decisions, and sometimes — in behavior with using emojis, throwballs, gifs at the table, or chatting with others in a specific way.

You can’t seriously change the population’s play and person’s acting during the game but you always can change your own behavior by adjusting to things you notice.

In other words, from Dan’s perspective the optimal way of playing poker is to look for better opportunities instead of relying on what the solver considers optimal in each situation. Sometimes this doesn’t include improving your technical skills but changing games or even how others see you.

“T” for “A Theory” but Not a Practice

Anti-GTO high-roller Ben “bencb789” Rolle has been preaching his philosophy for a couple of years. He even created a term for it, the “GTO trap” to describe situation “when you follow theoretical strategies that work against the perfect playing opponent but will lose you

money at the real poker tables”.

The thing is: people are unpredictable. Even the most serious, disciplined and professional of them sometimes have brain farts, make weird clicks and strange decisions. Unfortunately, GTO can’t give you more than a theoretical approach from mathematical standpoints but you have to consider how to apply it right in the heat.

Ben explains this better through this example:

“Imagine you’re playing an opponent that doesn’t like folding and this opponent will call hands that he’s never supposed to call.

GTO would tell you to have certain bluffs in order to be balanced. GTO always thrives for a perfect equilibrium with a mix of value and a good mix of bluffs.

Now at the poker tables you will face opponents that don’t like folding so bluffing against those opponents will cost you more money.”

So, how do you put money in your pocket instead? By exploiting opponents’ mistakes which GTO can’t teach you to do because it works with the presumption that everyone is playing optimally when they aren’t even close to that. 

“O” for “Optimal” but Not Really

Turn to your common sense for a second and ask yourself: What is optimal?

We assure you that people from various origins, cultural and working backgrounds see this term very differently. And even dictionaries can’t agree on how to define optimal. For example:

• In Cambridge Dictionary “optimal” means “most likely to bring success or advantage”.
• Dan Cates is convinced that optimal decisions bring you the most out of your life (or its specific area like poker) and they are the culmination of finding balance of two extremes.
• In the Merriam-Webster Dictionary “optimal” is “the most favorable or desirable”.
• On the POKERCODE website “optimal” is “complete balance in the game that makes your plays 100% unexploitable by your opponents”.
• The Nash equilibrium considers “optimal” as “staying the course of initial strategy while knowing the opponent’s strategy and that all players maintain the same strategy”.

How do all of these make GTO not the optimal way to play poker? Well, it isn’t optimal by any of definitions in the list:

• Relying on GTO can give you disadvantage versus exploitative opponents
• GTO outcomes can be unsatisfactory
• Being GTO-nerd doesn’t make you unexploitable
• Players don’t play perfectly and GTO can’t fully take it into account

Why Do We Study GTO Anyway?

It is okay if now you are thinking: “Well… so why do I need GTO at all?”.

Studying GTO, running sims and reviewing spots with the help of a solver is good training to develop orientation in different situations to make quick and profitable decisions.

You need to study GTO ranges to gain a real understanding that mathematically optimal ideal scenarios become irrelevant when they stumble on a human factor, especially — weird actions under pressure that are sometimes completely illogical. And if you don’t study the ideal version of someone’s play, you won’t be able to notice anything that deviates from it and exploit it.