I looked it up myself and it seems like at 100bb effective KQ is a pure shove. However when we simulate for the actual 1 SPR here (118 bb effective at the start of the hand) the result differs and KQ does start to check.

Would you value bet QX with a low kicker here in practise? If you suspect your opponent to be completely polarised on the Q turn, would you consider checking back weak QX on the river?

Good questions. This entirely depends on how do you expect their range to look like. The fact that the river is a 9 (which interacts with their turn bluffing range) increases the incentive for us to value-jam our Qx hands if we don't expect them to be slowplaying enough. If the river was a total blank and we expect their turn betting range to be hyper-polarized, I don't see any incentive on shoving the river with all of our Qx hands since they will be x/folding close to 100% anyway.

Yes I was also thinking the 9 river might be a good river to value shove thinner on against most opponents. QX is a lower hand strength on a 9 river than on a brick river, but when OOP checks they can have plenty of rivered 9X as bluffcatchers.

Thanks mat, glad you enjoyed it.

The thing with Stefan is that even if he's clearly overbluffing some spots, he seems to be also very good at counter-exploiting certain adjustments their opponents will make such as the one you described about checking back the flop with more middling and strong hands. I feel like he will always force you to ''play his game'' and he will beat you there because he's much better than anybody else at it. Really impressive stuff.

The last hand was funny too. What do you think Linus is trying to achieve with this turn overbet? Even if he thinks Stefan raises too many strong hands on the flop, what does he expect to happen here to justify this extremely large sizing?

Good question. It's very hard to know why he's exactly doing this here and I'm sure that there are many different things that he's trying to achieve by doing it. The main ones that I can think of will be to try to get overcalled by the Ax region which he dominates and also to increase his equity realization against Stefan's range.

Hey Jakob. Thank you, glad you enjoyed the series.

If a HUNL player has access to a software similar to AI GTOWizard, and has some external screen capture software which automatically inputs all the spots in real time, and the player just play according to the solutions presented by this GTO software, how would it be possible to beat this person in a HU NLHE match?

It just wouldn't be possible to beat them but it would also be very easy to detect, especially if done at the highest stakes.

From seeing the hands in the video series it seems to me that even a player like Stefan is making a fair share of blunders. Given the stakes that is still being played online there must be a huge money incentive for technical people with enough money to develop a tool like AI GTOWizard with fewer anti-cheating limitations.

A counter-argument I have heard from Phil Galfond and Saulo Costa with regards to this threat, is that pokersites of course are incentivized to avoid cheating going on, by also investing big sums of money in AI detection which can help catch players who try to cheat with RTA.

But lets say someone were to develop something which I suggested. In order not to get catched I assume an easy solutions would just be to occasionally deviate from the RTA's / GTO's suggestion, in spots where the EV cost would be minimal.

Very curious to hear more of your thoughts about this. Let's say Stefan were to play against GTOWizard's AI software. I find it hard to imagine that AI GTOWizard wouldn't crush Stefan and many other top regs quite hard in the long run?

Yes. RTA would definitely crush the top regs in the long run. That's for sure.

This was not course not possible previously with PIO where running a simulation takes quite a long time even with a very powerful PC/server. But since GTOWizard has now proven that it is already possible to solve any custom spot in just a matter of seconds, how is this not significant threat to online poker, and especially online highstakes HUNL?

Regarding the fair amount of blunders that you see Stefan making, it's important to be aware of the fact that these plays would be obviously bad vs an appropriate counter-strategy but the reason why he's coming with them is exactly because he expects his opponents to not counter them correctly. If you node-lock some tendencies, you would see that the solver suggests to play like Stefan does quite often. Tyler Forrester recorded his take on this match as well and I think he did a very good job at explaining the reasons for this exploitative plays. Make sure to check it out, is very good.

Regarding RTA, first of all I think that it's quite difficult (and probably quite expensive as well) to develop something like that and also to be smart enough to use it properly to avoid being caught.

When it comes to highstakes 6 max games, you would also be losing a huge amount of EV by playing ''GTO'' every hand since the money is coming from a player that if you don't max-exploit, you will be leaking a lot of value against. I'm not a 6 max player but I heard from multiple 6 max top regs before that a GTO bot would be winning significantly less than a highstakes player on a 6 max table with 1 recreational.

So in order to be able to use RTA profitably in 6 max games, you would need to be a very good poker player who's using RTA vs regs but is also max-exploiting vs fish and at that point I think most people are not willing to risk it and much rather just play those games and win less money without using RTA.

When it comes to highstakes HUNL, the most important thing to mention is that most people who are willing to risk using RTA are not going to be those who are already playing those stakes. Any new face who comes out of nowehere and starts to play really good would be extremely suspicious and most sites would be able to check wheater or not they're cheating and ban them if necessary.

That said, I think mid and low stakes are definitely in a worse position when it comes to RTA users for obvious reasons.