I have a macro that can calculate - based on MOP what our MDF for a 4 bet or fold OOP strategy vs different 3 bet sizes if anyone wants to PM me (provided you have Excel). 

It also calculates what % of that range we can have as 4bet bluffs based on the Risk/Reward ratio we give ourselves on our 4bet sizing.

Unfortunately it's really REALLY hard to solve fully (for IP) as we would need to know the equity a 5bet {value, bluffs} shove would have vs. our 4bet/calling range in order to calculate IP's optimal 3bet bluff/value mix, but it should be useful to get used to the math behind it, and definately useful for finding our MDF as an OOP opener deciding what % of their opens to defend.

The pot sizes based on whatever positions open/defend are written into it.

I'd like to mod it for situations like squeezes and things but it gives me mucho headaches trying to code based on memory (cos I make these things at work when I should be working).

But if anyone can think of another program for a math based situation they would like to solve let me know because I can't think of what to do next.

I do feel like there are more useful thigns to do with my time though!

So MANY questions....as someone that is just starting to tackle a real poker education and plays mostly on TAG fundamentals (strong starting hand selection and a stubborn streak) I found this very timely and interesting. Learning more can only help but you can't ignore instinct at the tables I agree. There are times when you really have no reads and no gut feel though so you have to rely on something! Ok- my plan is to start at the beginning and keep moving forward

I find myself disagreeing with your video.

The "minimum defense strategy" you mention as GTO --- isn't. Ben mentions it in his toy game #4. The MOP GTO uses indifference equations. Specifically that the EV of checking = EV of betting for a threshold hand. However, the EV of checking does NOT equal ZERO. This means the EV of betting shouldn't equal zero either.

If we try to make our opponents semibluffs worth zero. Our opponent should always check his bluffs. He gains substantial value by checking. Now check > bet, which violates the indifference equation (check = bet). This means the "minimum defence frequency formula" is wrong! It's not GTO, its a bad gambling system. 

There is a GTO minimum defence frequency, but the interactions of board texture and preflop action make it realistically unknowable for any given situation

Other issues you mention like Autopiloting, creativity limits, and mistake tilt. I generally find as pluses. As a long time mass tabler, having a solid auto pilot game is essential to my success. This solid auto pilot game needs to be based loosely around GTO because I am never going to have the flexibility to model specific opponents well. I play over 10,000 screennames a year. GTO gives me the flexibility to do that.

As to the limit of creativity, it's nice not to have to worry about whether 3-betting J2o was the right play against that aggro fellow.  When I review my database and I find spots where I was "creative" outside of my framework, it has generally cost me money. Telling me to trust my intuition in a variable response game is like asking me to rate my driving skills. I'm always going to think I'm better than most. 

Mistake tilt is easier to deal with as well. It's hard to get to angry about a hand, when in the long run my opponent lost 1/2 pot by his call or lost 1/2 the pot by his fold. Why would I tilt at making money?  In exploitative play, if I 3-bet J2o against the aggro fellow, I could lose a lot of money, if my read was wrong. I find that far more tilting.

I think the most worrying advice in this video was that some people do fine without doing off the table work and learn by playing. It certainly doesn't work that way for me, in fact I doubt it does for 99% of the poker playing population.

I took it as an accurate statement, not even advice per se. The advice I got from this video is that trying to implement game theory knowledge isn't necessarily the best way forward for all players of all abilities; Concepts are difficult to understand and easy to misapply. I don't see how that's bad advice for nearly everyone; If I were to teach a new player how to play poker I wouldn't even mention GTO, nor would I to micro stakes players. For what it's worth, a personal friend of mine happens to be an "old school feel based live player", and he also happens to have won more than 99.9% of the poker playing population.

As a danger signal to new students of GT, that will be usefull.

However, you convey some ideas which look wrong :

- it creates a limiting box : why would a better understanding of fundamentals of poker GT be limiting ?

- GTO knowledge is not compatible / complementary to other ways to get information (experience, ...)

- limits creativity : why would that be ? It might more likely be that it helps creativity, as you suspect for Sauce, but why would it be true for him and not for less knowledgeable players ?

- GTO learning could steal the love of the game : hmmm, seriously ???

- GTO knowledge should not be used when we have information of leaks, imbalances : I would say that Poker GT knowledge would rather help us better understand why/how some players are imbalanced and how to exploit these leaks (correct me if I'm wrong).

At the very least, GT knowledge will never prevent me from stealing the blinds of someone who never defend or exploit any other exploitable tendency :-)

Having an understanding of the game solely from experience is good, but how can it be better than a solid knowledge based on math ? Why not use both to reinforce our game understanding ?

And then the video title, "GT-No" : sounds like a definitive judgement to avoid learning GT. "GTO pitfalls" might have been better :-)

BTW, I really appreciate all your videos, which I find explain very well your thought processes in very interesting analyses; I think they offer some of the best value here :-)

As I am struggling to find balance in my play between GTO and exploitative/experience play I can definitely see myself in most of your points James. I found it to be a good video and true for at least some people.

That doesn't mean I'll stop learning GTO, I'll just think harder at the table in which spots I want to use it or not use it.  

I think (just my opinion) that it is the "O" in GTO that can sometimes trip people up. Optimal seems to imply solved or complete or no doubts or whatever. I think if we look at it as studying Game Theory and focus on the "T" things would be better or smoother at the beginning. I study and try to apply game theory to my game and my work away from the table, I don't play anywhere near an "optimal" game though. 

That being said I wouldn't be anywhere near the player I am today if I wouldn't have "got into" game theory. For me game theory in poker is just poker theory and it is a tool that helps me think about the game in a more critical way with an eye towards improvements and spotting stuff in my game (and my opponents game) that is obviously wrong/bad. 

I think game theory would help anyone who took the time to really look into it, even the "old school feel" players. I believe it would help improve their "feel". Thanks for the video James, looking forward to more - would like to see you do more power point videos. Maybe do one on the benefits of game theory? How it has helped your game?

I know something that I've repeatedly emphasized in my videos is that a game is only at equilibrium if neither player can increase their EV.  The practical problem becomes that it's not possible to solve any real poker games, so we're left applying lessons from simpler toy games to the real thing.  The problems with game theory and mathematical analysis come when people uncritically apply solutions from simple games to complex ones, for example, when people think that defending 1-A% must be right in NLHE because it's right in one street polarized toy games. 

Sometimes I think it's a better approach (if you're already a strong winning poker player with a lot of feel) to supplement a game theoretic approach with a more intuitive one.  For instance, if we decide it's right to bet some range in theory, a good intuitive check is to ask "is there someway this can get exploited?" and if we think there is it might point to a weakness in our "game theoretic" analysis.  I often ask myself these sorts of questions so that my gut can complement my brain, and vice versa.  

I know that (in my case at least) when I first started studying game theory and poker to the point of understanding a few basic results I had the tendency to way overestimate what I'd learned.  I think it's because prior to game theory every answer to a poker problem is provisional, i.e., "if he does this, then we do that," but game theory has the logical status of a result, i.e., "we do that," which feels powerful, especially to those of us with a logical bent.  The next step is realizing that we don't have solutions to anything resembling real poker games, which leaves these powerful toy game results in sort of a logical limbo- we've got the solution to a tiny little thing and we want to feel that same command over the big game.  One easy way to go is to apply some framework that seems implied by the little game to the big one, so we say "if it's right to call 1-A% in the toy game, then it's right to call our best 1-A% in the big one," and we might even add to it a little and say "or else he can profitably bet any two cards, so I've got a proof that calling 1-A is right by contradiction," (this is just one popular example of bad pseudo game theory reasoning, there are plenty of others) and what we're left with is a theoretical framework we can consistently apply in real poker games that tells us exactly how to play all of our hands.  That feels pretty good!  I've used multiple systems that seemed neat, tidy and almost perfect at the time, but whose deficiencies came back to torture me (and delight my opponents) for lots of money before I realized my mistake.  Unfortunately, (or fortunately) playing good poker remains really complicated.

As you improve in your career you will be able to realize when to stay within your framework off the table, and when to deviate.. Human's learned best by taking lots of information and clumping that information into less complicated  Patterns .. what I mean to say is that we learn to recognize  when do deviate and when not too, some better and faster then others. 

Great job with the part on foundation. 

Terrific video!!!

Keep doing this kind of video, please.

James, I love your videos on actual poker play, and I consider you one
of the best coaches on RIO, but you're obviously way over your head (as
most are) in even trying to address these concepts.

I don't think most people (read: Everybody but Sauce from what I can tell) even understand what Game Theory actually is. 

Game Theory is the application of some (quite advanced) mathematics to "the study of strategic decision making" (Wikipedia). 

It was the insight of people like John von Neumann that you could take various problems problems from seemingly disparate areas like the social sciences and gambling, and model them using the cutting-edge mathematics of the day.   

If you want to make a legitimate game-theoretic argument, you don't do it by saying "this is true because it looks good and jives with my experience" or "this is what some model tells us and now I'm going to apply it because I don't know what else to do".

You do it by using tools like linear algebra, topology, functional analysis, and other branches of mathematics which most of the people trying to make videos on the topic seem to be quite unfamiliar with.

To anybody with formal training in mathematics/science, most of the "game theory" content out there is literally like sitting down to read a novel in English and finding 90% percent of the words are written in Arabic.   

It taught me that it's not acceptable to take anything on faith
(except the axioms), and that's it's supposed to be very difficult to
actually understand something, because in order to claim to truly 
"understand" something, you should be apply it to the most general
cases, and the most specific cases, and everywhere in between, and you
should understand what really makes it go, etc...

It took me something like four days (and thirty sheets of paper) to even understand the first paragraph of Chapter 11 in MOP in the sense of "if I had never played poker before, but I only knew the rules, could I have come to the same conclusion that what they are trying to do is valid?  Could I apply the general idea here to another game that I had never played before, etc.?" 

In other words...intuition for things like personal relationship and survival is probably pretty good.  Intuition for things like mathematics or science is...often not so safe to rely on. 

In fact, the modern scientific was invented so that erroneous "intuition" would be suitably displaced as the source of anything legitimate when it came to claiming "knowledge".  

It was Richard Feynman who said, "the first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool".

The reality is that a five-year old has the prerequisites to do a lot of "advanced" mathematics, and that most people are actually taught backwards.