Poker is crumbling due to GTO and finite skill gap.
Posted by Disharmonist
Posted by
Disharmonist
posted in
Gen. Poker
Poker is crumbling due to GTO and finite skill gap.
Poker is easy to learn and hard to master. You can advise novices to always raise their starting hands, limit the amount of hands they play, play agressivly and you can improve their game tremendously.
The better you get, the more effort you will need in order to optimize your game. It is the same with basically anything skill based. The learning curve flatens after a while, people´s skill grow slower or stagnate completly. Even if you maximize your own potential, most depends on how good or bad your opponents are.
In times of GTO, we assume there is an optimal strategy, so you can describe your skill as
skill = GTO - your deviation from GTO.
Your profit = villainsmistakes - your mistakes. If villain plays close to perfect , you would have to play even closer to perfect to win. You cannot play better than optimal or perfect.
Even if you play perfect, the margin of your winnings depends on your opponents lack of perfection.
All GTO-approaches , solvers and deeper analyisis tools aim to squeeze out a comparativly small winrate.
All of this takes away a lot of exitement, uncertainty and mystery of poker which are the main factors recreational players decide to gamble.
We are heading to a point where we will still have a small circle of elitist highstakes players and still some lowstakes big losers you just give poker a shot or two, but we are going to lose the poker middleclass.
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Don't give up yet. Its important to remember that no matter how many professionals there are the vast majority of the world is not skilled at the game of poker. If more people are introduced to the game and markets grow there is always profit to be made. Game selection is important though and you need to be prepared to adapt!
Poker has been slowly getting harder to beat for as long as I have played it(12 years). Sure this trend will continue but the really question for me is - How long will it take before I can't beat reasonable stakes?
I think poker will certainly get tougher as time goes on, but I don't know if GTO means the death of poker. The concept has been around for a while now and the vast majority of players still spaz every other hand. The best thing you can do if you want the more prosperous times to come back is to try to push for legislation in the US. Next best thing is to share the game with your friends. Outside of that... just do your best to adjust and accept the times.
The elephant in the room is the inevitable battle between poker sites and bots that do a good job of approximating GTO. We don't like thinking about it because the idea of losing online poker to the machines hurts. Playing on sites that care about and invest in bot detection seems vitally important. Other than rake concerns I would be entirely comfortable investing in poker study if its just me Vs other players with access to the same non real-time GTO tools on a level playing field. If the sites aren't preparing for significant investment in maintaining the integrity of the game then I fear the dream will be over quite soon.
There will always be Human Error in the game of Poker. For online poker as long as the war on Bots playing online continues to rise i think Poker will still be profitable to play.
I don't think it is true, the game is so complex anyone who isn't ready to put in maybe even tens of thousands of hours (which 99.999% players are not ready to do.) won't get anywhere close to GTO.
What is GTO?
The current poker model is high rake and one fish per table. Number of fish determine number of tables. Playing regs is only good for the site given current rake levels.
I think the most overlooked thing that will keep poker alive forever is the inability of humans to consistently play their A-game. Even if the entire industry became capable of understanding how-to-GTO, there would still be differences in mental stability that would separate players dramatically.
This. Knowing and executing are two very very different things. Even "knowing GTO" is super hard.
This! People will always be people, thus there will always be human error involved in the game.
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