A GTO pre-flop chart is a guide that shows you the best starting hands to play. It’s based on maths and ensures your plays are impossible for opponents to take advantage of.
We understand that when new punters hear about GTO poker charts, they can get completely lost. Long story short, it’s an unexploitable strategy to have up your sleeve when you play against tough opponents. However, there’s more to it, and you should understand everything about it from the basics so that you can use it like a pro. Our guide will help you with just that, so let’s get started, shall we?
In Game Theory Optimal (GTO) poker, the goal is to make your plays so balanced and hard to read that no opponent can gain an advantage over you. You are not trying to find and attack other players’ weaknesses. Instead, you are focused on playing a solid, well-rounded game that protects you from being exploited.
By using this poker betting strategy, you will consistently bluff and bet for value with a wide range of hands, without worrying about what your opponent is doing. The strategy works because it makes money from the mistakes your opponents are bound to make.
GTO is a proven and highly effective method, especially in heads-up (one-on-one) poker. Even though computers have mainly figured out heads-up play, the basic ideas of GTO can also be used in games with more players.
GTO poker preflop charts are the key components of this strategy. Basically, they are visual aids, usually in a grid format, that show you the theoretically correct hands to play from each position at the poker table.
It’s important to understand how this strategy really works and take a look at the game theory concepts that every player should know before playing.
While playing, most poker players tend to think in simple terms about whether to call a bet or fold. In fact, they might even base their decision on information that’s not necessarily accurate. But here’s the thing, humans are prone to various biases. And when it comes to poker, players often make decisions based on subtle cues, past experiences with a player, and other non-measurable factors.
However, unlike humans, poker solvers (computer programs that create GTO strategies) use a systematic, mathematical approach to find the perfect play. For instance, a solver might tell you to raise with specific hands a certain amount of the time before the flop, no matter who you are playing against.
To show how frequencies work, a poker solver might suggest you “3-bet” a certain hand 70% of the time before the flop and fold it the other 30% of the time when facing a raise. Solvers use this same idea on later streets, telling you how to split up your range of hands in ways that are perfectly balanced and impossible to exploit.
When you use a GTO poker strategy, you will stop focusing on short-term results. Your decisions will sometimes even be based on a randomly generated number.
Balance is very important in this strategy, and it begins before the flop. Whether you are in a cash game or a tournament, poker solvers can show you the correct hand ranges to play from every position. While solvers agree that you should play fewer hands from early positions and more from late positions, the way they structure these hand ranges is unique.
Many traditional poker players only play strong hands from an early position. However, poker solvers suggest a more balanced approach. For instance, they recommend playing hands like suited aces and connected cards like queen-ten suited, even from a difficult position. It’s because having these hands in your range prevents your opponents from realising you only have premium cards and exploiting that knowledge.
Using this strategy, you will add new hands for both value and bluffing from every position at the table. This creates a perfectly balanced range that is impossible to exploit, no matter if your opponents play too tightly or too loosely. Whether someone re-raises, folds, or calls your bet, your hand range is so well-rounded that you will have a great response to any of those actions.
Poker solvers give you the exact solutions for these scenarios. This makes it possible to create charts for every pre-flop situation so you know the correct way to play each hand.
For those who are newly trying out this strategy, it may seem quite random or might not even make any sense. But let us assure you that that’s not the case. Every decision is based on solid maths and logic. Just like a human, a poker solver considers things like pot odds and implied odds to make its choices.
In fact, in this strategy, you don’t need to worry too much about what your opponent is doing or what hands they have. Your plays will be perfectly balanced and impossible to exploit. This is possible because poker’s maths is more complex than it seems. When facing a bet, a solver’s decisions are based on a concept called “minimum defence frequency” (MDF).
You can’t perfectly calculate “minimum defence frequency” (MDF) during a game, but it’s a great tool for studying poker. To put it simply, MDF is the smallest percentage of hands you must continue playing to prevent opponents from taking advantage of you.
Playing poker using a GTO strategy, your range of hands gets smaller with each decision you make. Based on how much your opponent bets, the concept of MDF tells you how many of your hands you should continue with. So, the bigger the bet, the fewer hands you need to continue playing.
Some poker players on TV make what look like strange calls or folds. This is likely because they are applying the concept of MDF, which tells them to call or fold a certain number of hands based on the size of the bet. When facing a bet, you should consider your total number of hand combinations, figure out your MDF, and then reduce the number of potential winning hands you play accordingly.
Here’s the formula you can use to find out your MDF:
Pot Size / (Pot Size + Bet Size) = MDF
After you figure out what percentage of hands to fold to a bet, you need to decide which specific hands to get rid of. The goal is to keep the hands that have the most potential on later streets and discard those that are unlikely to improve or won’t play well against your opponent.
A poker solver can help you make these choices. Practising with a solver is one of the best ways to prepare for real games. It’s important to understand that MDF is a complex but essential concept that you will continue to study as you learn to play GTO poker.
With GTO poker, remember that you want to balance everything, including your bet sizes. To stay unpredictable and unexploitable, every bet size you use should sometimes be a bluff and other times a value bet.
While a GTO strategy calls for more value bets than bluffs, it’s not shy about bluffing. In fact, most GTO players bluff more than traditional players because the average player doesn’t bluff nearly enough.
While GTO poker ensures your strategy is unexploitable, it doesn’t actively try to take advantage of your opponents’ mistakes. Players who don’t use a perfect strategy will still lose money, but a skilled exploitative player might be able to make them lose a lot more.
For example, against a player who calls too often, a GTO strategy will still bluff sometimes. Even though you know the bluff is unlikely to work, you do it to keep your play balanced. Your overall strategy is perfect, so you won’t lose money, but a strong exploitative player would make more money. They would simply never bluff and always bet for value because they know their opponent will call regardless.
The biggest drawback of an exploitative strategy is that it leaves you vulnerable to being exploited yourself. Basically, you should use a GTO strategy against strong players you can’t easily exploit. Meanwhile, you should use an exploitative strategy against weaker players who tend to make a lot of mistakes.
The best approach is to first learn GTO poker to build a solid, unexploitable strategy. Then, learn how to adjust that strategy to take advantage of weaker players. When your GTO basics are clear, you will be protected from the best players, and you will know exactly where others are making mistakes. This allows you to have more fun as you maximise your profits with well-timed exploitative plays.
GTO poker charts are a set of unexploitable preflop strategies based on game theory. They show you the perfect action for every starting hand in a given situation, like raising, calling, or folding. The important thing to consider is that these charts serve as a blueprint for preflop play, covering scenarios like opening a pot or reacting to a raise.
While playing, your strategy is highly dependent on your position at the table, as you will play a tighter range of hands from early positions and a looser range from later positions. While the true GTO strategy can be complex, often recommending a mix of actions for certain hands, simpler charts round these to make them easier to use.
Finally, these charts are also specific to the stack sizes, as the value of chips and the risk or reward of plays change with different stack depths. To sum it up, GTO charts provide a strong preflop poker game that is guaranteed not to be exploited by opponents over the long run.
To use GTO poker charts, you need to do more than just memorise them. The process involves four important steps:
While this strategy seems quite appealing, it can be difficult to master. Not to break your bubble or anything, but learning the perfect GTO poker requires a lot of patience, effort, and, of course, spare time. It might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but what players can do is try to build a strong foundation using a balanced GTO strategy. Then, you can switch to an exploitative approach whenever you spot a mistake that you can take advantage of.
In the end, understanding the basics and practising it over and over again is the only solution to mastering this strategy. So, without further ado, why don’t you start practising since our article already cleared the basics?
Read next:
A GTO pre-flop chart is a guide that shows you the best starting hands to play. It’s based on maths and ensures your plays are impossible for opponents to take advantage of.
GTO charts can’t guarantee you will win every time in the shirt run. However, they give you a strong strategy that will make you profitable in the long run against anyone who isn’t playing perfectly.
GTO hand ranges are valuable because they create a perfectly balanced strategy. This makes you impossible to exploit and forces your opponents to make mistakes, which you can profit from over time.
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