Updated on March 21, 2025
You’ve probably heard the term GTO poker during your time at the tables, but if you’ve opened this article, you’re unlikely to be a GTO wizard.
If that’s the case, don’t worry; this article will help you add ‘GTO pro’ to your list of known poker definitions, which should help you keep up with the chit-chat in the card rooms.
What Is GTO Poker?
GTO stands for ‘Game Theory Optimal’, which is a perfectly balanced and, therefore, unbeatable poker strategy. GTO isn’t necessarily the most profitable way to play an individual hand, but it will beat any player not playing GTO in the long run.
In fact, the only way an opponent can combat a GTO strategy is with their own GTO poker chart, which leads to both players breaking even.
Why Doesn’t Everyone Play GTO?
Some people prefer different approaches to learning how to play poker. The main reason people don’t play exclusively GTO poker is that it is complicated to learn and employ.
Though many top pros try to play as close to it as possible, true GTO poker is too complicated for our puny human minds to implement.
Instead, the best poker players of all time find ways to simplify it, focusing on the most common scenarios and grouping similar spots to make things easier.
GTO vs Exploitative Play
When regular people think about poker, they usually imagine players making huge bluffs after watching beads of sweat roll down a player’s face or examining how they break Oreos. While this isn’t necessarily accurate, adjusting to your opponents is an approach to poker known as exploitative play.
For example, if you notice that your opponent rarely folds on the river, an exploitative approach would see bigger river bets for value and not a poker bluff in sight!
Though you will crush your opponents if you make good exploitative adjustments to your play, you make yourself exploitable. You become unbalanced and begin doing things more often than you should.
If your opponent figured out what you were doing, they would know to fold whenever you made a big bet and bluff whenever you checked. By doing this, they would exploit you.
With poker GTO, however, this scenario doesn’t happen. GTO doesn’t care about your opponent. It doesn’t need to. Since it’s unexploitable, it will work against any opponent, even if they know what you’re doing.
GTO poker is not always the most profitable way to play an individual poker hand against a weak player, which is why some top pros criticise the trend towards it. They argue it’s a better idea to try to exploit weak opponents as much as possible
You don’t need to be balanced against players who don’t know how to exploit you, and these players won’t be around for the long term anyway.
GTO Poker Bots
With computer power getting better and better, it’s a common misconception that poker bots are taking over the poker world. While this is an understandable concern, it’s not something people should be worried about just yet.
Poker sites are very good at spotting GTO cheats and bots. As I said earlier, GTO is too complicated for a person to learn, so anyone playing perfect poker GTO stands out like a mankini in a nunnery.
GTO strategies often require players to make fantastically counter-intuitive plays, and cheats have been caught because top pros reported these suspiciously wild acts of genius.
What Does a GTO Strategy Look Like?
In every card room and at every stake, players discuss big pots and key decisions. It’s part of human nature to want to validate our choices, especially if they are costly. It can be easy to get bogged down in making the right play when we first get into poker.
For example, if asked the best way to play JJ or AK, you’d probably have an opinion on how the poker hands ranked, but game theory doesn’t work like this. Instead of looking at the right play in terms of absolutes, GTO deals with frequencies.
A complete GTO strategy will require you to bet, raise, check-raise, and everything else at different frequencies with the same hand. Instead of being a bet, check or fold; hands become more like an x% bet, x% fold and x% call.
There is no right decision regarding GTO, which is one of the things that makes it so difficult to grasp.
The History of GTO
If you hopped in a time machine back to the Golden Nugget casino in 1965, references of GTO would most likely refer to the classic Ferrari racing cars of the time. Even in the highest-stakes poker rooms, poker hadn’t come that far yet.
It wasn’t that the players sucked. While poker has evolved a lot over the last few decades, the biggest brains typically have dominated the game. It was just that technological limitations held things back.
It wasn't until after the poker boom that GTO started to take off. Thanks to improved computer power and poker-tracking software, simple solvers began to appear, and complex mathematical strategy books like Bill Chen's The Mathematics of Poker emerged.
Unlike the simplicity of the poker cheat sheet, those who had the dedication (and brain power) to work through it began to see the game in a different light.
Initially, GTO poker solvers were very slow, and complicated simulations could take a lot of time to run, which made them slow to work with. Over the last decade, however, computers have become way more powerful, and you can even run sims on a mobile phone.
This factor has made GTO more accessible, especially to the new generation of poker players who have grown up with technology.
In the WSOP last year, players used GTO strategies apps on the rail. These apps are easily implemented, and it seems that the difficulties of studying GTO have been replaced by the need to stop players from exploiting it.
Do the Best Players Play GTO?
It's impossible for a human to learn true GTO, but many top players work tirelessly to bring their games as close as possible to GTO.
Conversely, other players, like Charlie Carrel, have had great success with a more exploitable approach.
Should You Play Poker GTO?
If you rubbed Aladdin's lamp, wishing for a perfect GTO game might be a pretty good idea. But the reality is that learning GTO poker takes more time and effort than many of us can or are willing to spare.
Instead, most people aim to have a solid GTO foundation, working on being as balanced as possible in the most common situations and then employing an exploitative approach whenever they see an opportunity.
GTO Poker Quiz – SCROLL DOWN FOR ANSWERS
1: GTO poker is named after the Ferrari GTO.
2: GTO Strategy always wins.
3: If two players play GTO, they will break even.
4: The best players in the world can play GTO perfectly.
5: All top pros play GTO poker.
6: You can’t beat a player who plays perfect GTO poker.
7: GTO poker became more popular after the poker boom:
8: GTO is all about preflop poker hands probability.
9: It’s always better to play GTO against fish.
10: Players were caught running GTO sims at the WSOP
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GTO Poker Quiz - ANSWERS
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- False
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- True
- True
- False
- False
- True
