What Is GTO Poker?

GTO stands for game theory optimal. A GTO strategy is one that is mathematically ideal, such that no player can improve their expected outcome against a GTO strategy by deviating from GTO themselves. In other words, there is no way to exploit a GTO strategy. Any deviation from the GTO strategy would either be expected to lose money, or break even.

What does "unexploitable" actually mean?

The term gets thrown around a lot, so it's good to have a clear definition of what it actually means. Simply put, it means that there is no strategy that your opponent can switch to that will show an increase in expected profit against you. One important aspect to remember here is that this applies to your whole range, and in the long run. It's entirely possible that an individual hand in a GTO strategy can become unprofitable against a deviation, but a GTO strategy as a whole can never lose EV against any other strategy.

GTO and the Nash equilibrium

GTO solutions in poker are closely tied to several game theory concepts. In game theory, the concept of a Nash equilibrium is a scenario where, assuming that all other players' strategies are fixed, no player could gain more by changing their own strategy. This results in an equilibrium state, where each player is playing the best possible strategy available to them, with any deviation costing them. In poker, it is this equilibrium state that is the "GTO" solution.

It's also important to note that in poker, there can be several equilibria that have very similar or close expected value, and can serve as more playable approximations. For example, you can simplify the game tree to allow only a few (or 1) bet size, and often achieve a very similar expected EV compared to solutions that allow for all bet sizes.

What a GTO push/fold range looks like

When the only two options are shove and fold, a GTO strategy is a list of the 169 starting hands with a shove frequency attached to each one. Most of them are settled - 100% shove or 100% fold, and no interesting decision to make. The hands worth studying are the ones in between.

Those are the mixed hands, shoved some fraction of the time and folded the rest. They exist because always doing one thing with a hand at the edge of your range is a pattern, and a pattern is what makes a strategy exploitable. If a hand is a coin flip between shoving and folding in EV terms, the solver mixes it, and the right way to read that is not "the solver is unsure" but "this hand is genuinely worth the same either way."

Does GTO win the most money?

No - and this is the part most explanations skip. GTO guarantees you cannot be exploited. It does not extract the maximum from an opponent who is currently making a mistake, because it is not paying attention to them at all. A GTO range is built against a hypothetical opponent playing perfectly, so it plays the same way against a calling station and against a solver.

Against someone who folds far too often to a shove, the highest-EV response is not to stay balanced - it is to shove wider and collect the folds. That deliberately unbalanced range wins more than GTO does against that specific player, and becomes losing if they ever adjust. Which one you should be playing, and what counts as enough evidence to switch, is the subject of GTO vs. exploit.

Do you need to play GTO?

As a baseline, you should. At a table of strangers you usually have no reliable read, and GTO is the correct strategy to employ. It also gives you the reference point that makes everything else legible: a deviation is only an exploit if you know what you are deviating from, otherwise it is a guess.

GTO is particularly valuable at short stacks. Once you are under about 15bb the decision collapses to shove or fold, the tree is small, and the solved answer is knowable and memorable in a way that a deep-stacked postflop decision is not. That is also where the mistakes are most expensive - short stack strategy works through why.