What Is GTO in Poker? A Beginner’s Guide to Game Theory Optimal

These programs are very effective during heads-up battles but can work in tables of up to six players.

GTO Poker Strategy

Ask the average poker player — or even one of the top professionals in our guide to who has the most WSOP bracelets — how to play in early position, and they’ll likely tell you to limit your range and play only the strongest hands. It makes sense, as you’re giving a strong positional advantage to your opponents, so you want to be prepared.

However, a GTO poker chart or poker solver would instruct you to play all suited aces and hands like Q-J, which would typically be considered weak in this position.

It’s all about expanding your range to keep your opponents guessing. If you only play strong hands and fold everything else, your opponents will know you have something good when you raise, making it hard to get any value from strong hands.

With an expanded range, they won’t be able to guess what you have, leaving you with bluffing options and making it easier to get value when you catch a big hand.

Minimum Defense Frequency (MDF)

Poker GTO introduces the concept of minimum defense frequency (MDF), which is the percentage of hands you should continue betting/calling to avoid exploitation. The number is calculated based on the pot and bet size using the following formula:

Pot Size / (Bet Size + Pot Size) = MDF %

Is Poker GTO Random?

Poker solvers aren’t just randomly instructing you to make moves in the hope of confusing your opponents. If that were the case, there would be nothing to separate the best GTO poker players and complete newbies whose random play is governed by the fact they don’t know what they’re doing or when they have a good/bad hand.

GTO poker solvers account for pot odds and implied odds, ensuring you only bet when it makes sense. However, they don’t account for what other players are doing and don’t try to read their hands. The goal is not to try to guess how strong or weak another player is and then exploit them accordingly. It’s all about creating balance and getting value from steals, bluffs, and winning hands.

Is GTO in Poker the Perfect Strategy?

Poker GTO strategies are more about being unexploitable than winning every hand, and they can’t teach you every facet of the game. Most poker pros use GTO these days, but they still try to read their opponents and look for weaknesses and exploitations.

Rather than seeing it as a perfect strategy like basic blackjack strategy in blackjack, think of it more as a framework on which you can base your tournament play. In other words, you should learn it and understand why it is important. Still, you don’t need to go too far down the rabbit hole and try to become a poker-playing automaton, as you’re playing against real people at the end of the day, and there are many variables on the poker table.

Summary: GTO Meaning and Strategy

Poker GTO strategies are widely employed in online and offline poker tournaments, and you can find videos and articles of poker pros discussing them. But it’s just one piece of the puzzle—you should also learn how to get value from big hands with nut hand poker strategy and how to transition from a big table to heads-up play—and while it’s always a good idea to study game theory in poker, it’s not enough to make you the perfect player.