GTO, exploitation and frustration!

Game Theory Optimal:

I am sure most of you heard of this concept atleast vaguely. Many know that it exists but nearly no one really tries to use it to their benefits as the rumors say that you cant play this way anyway as it would be too complex.
Game Theory Optimal means that you play a strategy that cant be exploited by anybody. If two players play a GTO style against each other, neither player can improve their expected value by changing their strategy.
A very good article about GTO on 3bets/4bets and 5bets is here .
It basicly illustrates how each player defends with a range that makes him unexploitable against the other players deviations.

So how does that benefit us now?

Most of the time it is not smart to play GTO unless the other player is better then we are because we can play exploitative. But if we know how our opponent should respond if he would be playing GTO, we know how we can exploit him if he doesnt!


Here is an example of Game Theoretical Optimum play and how we exploit any deviation:

Player A opens for 3bb. The pot is now 4.5bb including the blinds.
Player B 3bet to 9bb and its folded to Player A.
How does he know what is GTO now? Well he has to know, when Player B starts to exploit him.
Player B risks 9bb to win 4.5bb. So once Player A folds more then 66% of the time, Player B is autoprofiting (assuming Player B always looses once called).
So that in mind, Player A has to defend 33% of his initial opening range to not get exploited.
Since Player A is out of position to Player B, he chooses to only defend by 4betting or folding.
If Player A 4bets to 27bb, he needs to win 1 out of 3 times again to be breakeven. So if Player B folds more then 66% to 4bets, Player A is autoprofiting again :)
This is completly without any equity calculations since those can be found in a lot of other articles and take a lot of pages to write. 
But my example gives us enough information on how to use GTO knowledge to exploit someone.

If we know, that our opponent is 3betting more then GTO but folds a bigger part of his range to 4bets and only continues with [QQ+, AK] (which is not enough to reach those 33% that he needs to defend), we can increase our 4b-bluffingrange by a lot and only call a 5bet with [AA,KK].
If our opponent is 3betting less then GTO, we can probably remove our 4bet bluffingrange and just be jamming with [AA,KK] as he will not fold after 3betting with such a strong range anyway.

This is applicable to a lot more situations like the Cbet. When are you autoprofiting with your Cbet? Does he defend less then he needs to, to not let you autoprofit? If yes, bet ATC. If no, work out a range that does good against his range.

This is only a very broad overview about GTO and I advocate you guys to research a little more to get more insight into it.

Frustration:

Four more days until I can see my Cashier again.
It really itches me to not know how bad I am running currently but I can also feel a better emotional state of mine as I have no clue if I am down or up overall, which shifts my focus more towards how good my gameplay is. I think 50nl might have to wait another week or two as I am not running too well currently. I have a broad overview of my bankroll in mind, eventho I cant look at it but I will see how much reality deviates from my assumption :)