uZzzig

Interesting read! Something similar happened to Great Britain's rowing team. They kept asking themselves 'Will it make the boat go faster?' before doing anything.

..."In a recent speech, he explained they asked 'Will lifting weights make the boat go faster? Probably.' So they did, 'Will attending the Olympic opening ceremony make the boat go faster? No.' So they didn’t."...

This is a great question to be asking yourself, you are on the right path towards improving as a player.

GTO is always a concept that creates what seems dull discussions, mostly from people who aren't interested in GTO because they only view poker as a strategy game where the most important thing is to make money as fast as possible, thus finding the best games and exploiting their opponents becomes their #1 priority. That's all good and valid, we all want better winrates and less variance, but, at least for me, exercising extreme bum-hunting can turn poker on too much of a grind.

For this reason, I (and encourage everyone to do the same), from time to time, play heads-up against better opponents and force myself to think about how my ranges could be exploited, knowing a superior player will find my leaks. I then value these investments very heavily, because I know I'm losing money in that situation, I exhaustively analyze each and every hand I played vs him‎.

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To answer your questions, we can't talk about a gto strategy without a math heavy response, after all, gto is a mathematical concept. But before we get into math, given that there are no numbers in OP to do math with, I'd like to point out a few things:

1. For the most part your assumptions seem correct. However, the reason we skip c-betting our bottom range oop it's because these are the hands with less equity in our range and we don't have the required fold equity to be able bet our whole range profitably. For the same reason (more equity and more fold equity - by blocking pairs/two pairs/sets, etc...), we include our mid range in our c-betting range. Equity is your best friend, use it adequately.

2. First of all, when talking about an AK5r board texture, there's no way blind's defending range is stronger than your opening range. Keep in mind we need to estimate a 3-betting range of mostly high card hands, thus weaking blinds defending range considerably. That's the reason why this isn't a board texture where you should be extremely worried about getting check/raise frequently, he just shoudn't do it, if he does, then you need to figure our how to exploit his extremely weak range on this spot.

In order to estimate our c-betting frequency and bet sizes (to later determine how often we need to continue vs a c/r of X size) we first need to analyze the flop hand categories break-down of both players, to accurately determine how often they have different clashes of hands.