But “as you adjust your strategy to an opponent’s strategy, he or she will adjust to yours, and so forth” (Yakovenko). This is what GTO poker is all about” ( Yakovenko). “You have some idea of what the strategy would be with various hands, and your job is to take that into account when executing your own strategy. When playing against a human, one must factor in a certain amount of randomness and consider the various strategies they could be using. In a heads-up game, with only two players, one should win more often than not strictly following the statistics, but in reality this rarely happens. But GTO does not mean one should always follow the statistics. Any hand not within their range, they will fold. With the following GTO, the player will have a range, a number of the different hand combinations that they will call or raise with. For example, when the player is faced with the decision of check/call, bet, or fold at the start of every hand, there are different hand combinations (A,A, K,K, A,K, etc.) which each have an associated win percentage. In general, the optimal theory dictates that the player is always making the decision that returns the most profit in the long run.
Game Theory Optimal (GTO) poker is “an umbrella term players use to describe the holy grail of no-limit holdem playing strategy” (MasterClass).
Game Theory Optimal (GTO) Texas Holdem Poker Theory