The Ultimate Guide to GTO Poker Solvers – 7. All about GTO Poker Trainers

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The Ultimate Guide to GTO Poker Solvers - 7. All about GTO Poker Trainers

Yooooooo. What’s up guys, it’s D7 back with the eagerly anticipated, extremely long-awaited 7th instalment of the Ultimate Guide to Poker Solvers. 

Today we are going to talk about GTO poker trainers – what they are, which one is best and how you can use one to play better poker. GTO poker trainers are the cutting edge of poker training software in 2020. We’ll look at how using a GTO trainer as part of your poker study can help you outplay your opponents and understand your ranges better. We’ll talk about a few of the most popular GTO trainer programs, both desktop and app based, across a variety of poker formats.

GTO Training Software

So! You’ve got yourself a solver (which? see Which is the Best Poker Solver), you’ve run some sims and you’re ready to use them to realise more equity than your opponents. Great! If you’re like most people, you’re probably simming hands from recent sessions and trying to learn what you can from there. This is the traditional approach, and a good one. Until recently it was arguably the shortest path to the top of the heap in poker.

But there is a new kid on the poker study block. Not itself a solver, a GTO training program allows you to load your solver solutions into a client, and virtually ‘play’ against a bot playing precise GTO (within the solution parameters, of course). With this new type of software, you can pick a specific area of your game that needs work (say, SB vs BTN 3bet pots or BTN vs BB single raised pots) and drill ONLY THAT situation. 

The program gives you instant feedback on how much the line you chose lost vs a perfect opponent, or how often the line was taken if it’s a mixed frequency spot. Over time, you can see how much EV you’ve lost relative to the best action you could’ve taken at each node, giving you concrete feedback on whether or not you’re improving. Pretty sick right?

Exploitative Poker Strategy

Right. But a word of caution – using a GTO poker training program helps you lose less vs a perfect opponent, it does not provide any feedback regarding how a real opponent in one of your games might be playing suboptimally, and therefore how you might do better than equilibrium strategy and exploit your opponent. This is the part of poker that is difficult, somewhat subjective and much less amenable to precise analysis. It’s also where almost all of the real money is made. Years after poker solvers were going to take over the world (according to idiots like me… ), there are still no easy answers! For a more detailed discussion of the difference between GTO and exploitative strategies in poker, see part 3 of this series – GTO vs Exploitative Poker.

Best GTO Trainer

Alright, so we understand what a GTO trainer can help us with, and what it can’t. We play plenty pots vs decently tough opponents, and we’d like to improve our understanding of what equilibrium looks like in whatever spot. A GTO trainer can absolutely help with this. So which shall we choose?

There are a bunch of GTO trainer type softwares on the market. As with other articles, I’m going to weight my discussion drastically towards those I have personally used and am familiar with. Fortunately for you, these also happen to be the best and most commonly used 🙂

Simple GTO Trainer Review

As PioSolver is king of the poker solver market, so Simple GTO trainer is king of the GTO trainer market. It’s been around the longest, it’s competitively priced, well supported, updated frequently and (crucially…) fully customisable to your own needs.

Out of the box, Simple GTO comes pre-loaded with some scenarios which will let you play around with the software, get used to the interface and get a handle on how it all works. There’s also a fairly massive selection of ‘Cloud Training Packs’ – these are what they sound like – packs of sims, created and run usually by a coach of some kind, which you can buy access to and train with, all without even buying a pro license for the software. If you’re on a budget, this could be a great option for getting your feet wet with GTO training. You can check out the full selection of cloud training packs here (note: affiliate link, good for 10% off). 

Simple GTO Trainer Custom Drills

For my money though, the real benefit of Simple GTO comes from the custom drills feature. Honestly I’ve never looked in too much depth at what’s available with the cloud packs, but for me I’d like to know exactly the parameters used for the sims so I know nothing obvious or that I use/see a lot is excluded.

For this you will need a pro license, and some sims you’ve run yourself. Simple GTO integrates pretty easily with PioSolver, so if you’re run a script over a few situations the files you produced will be ideal. (Don’t know how to script with PioSolver? – learn that plus a whole lot more with the BitB Cash PioSolver Masterclass, from just $77)

There are two main types of custom drill – playing hands and individual nodes. The difference between them in that X let’s you play hands, from flop to river (if you get there), e.g. you have ATo, the board is K43r you face a bet of whatever size, turn 7h etc etc. On the other hand Y let’s you play one specific node over and over again across a random selection of the boards you’ve included in your subset/script. So you might be playing BTN vs BB flop Cbet or check in single raised pots – the program will let you play that node only (you won’t go on to the turn or even face a XR), over and over again with different parts of your range and on different boards.

Both have their own merits – I’d say it’s a little bit more fun to play out entire hands ‘against’ the bot, but it’s much more specific to work on just 1 node rep after rep. It’s worth mentioning aswel – that node can be any node in the sim. So if you save full Pio trees, you could drill BTN vs BB spots once you’ve cbet the flop, turn pairs the bottom card (or is any random card), river is whatever card and you face a block bet. This is super, super useful, as it allows you to rapidly build intuition for the threshold type of hands that might want to fold/call/raise – it might take a month to play 50 of these spots, with Simple GTO you can play that many in 20m. 

One last cool feature – if you set it up right and tell Simple where your PioViewer is located, you can open the solution you played with 1 click and see the full detail on the situation you played.

Simple GTO Trainer Discount

Ok ok, so incase you couldn’t tell I’m a big fan of Simple GTO. I messaged them about this article, and they were kind enough to offer 10% off not just their trainer, but any of the fine products they put out. You can check out Simple GTO here, and any of their other products here. (Obviously these are affiliate links and we’ll get some juice if you buy something). With this discount the pro license comes to $179 per year, well worth it if you are willing to put in the time and effort 

Mobile GTO Training

One other team that definitely deserve a shoutout is DTO. They have taken a different approach to delivering a GTO training product, choosing to go with a mobile app rather than a desktop client. Right now, they only have MTT situations available, which frankly tend to boggle my brain 😀 – but it is very cool to be able to grind some spots (however freaky) while on the sofa/can. 

Advanced Poker GTO Trainers

The only other GTO trainer I’ve used myself is Lucid GTO. The main benefit of this program for me was the much faster sim loading time. With full trees including river nodes, it takes Simple GTO (and PioSolver itself) a long time to load, Lucid has a preloading feature which means spots load much quicker, which seems to me to be a pretty substantial advantage. There is a workaround though – in Simple I usually load the spot in Pio after I play it, then start it loading the next spot while I have a look at what’s going on. 

The Lucid client (first image in this article) is also arguably more visually appealing than Simple – showing the full situation including the folded players preflop helps me consider the spot with more clarity. They also have made their own solution viewer, which Simple does not have. However I am not a fan of this view as it shows EVs in a different manner than Pio – notice the EV of check is negative, this could never happen in Pio. I believe what’s going on (please correct me in the comments if I’m wrong) is that the Lucid solution viewer shows the absolute EV of each action relative to the start of the hand, rather than the node we’re in now. I imagine this could be easily fixed so that the EVs displayed in the same manner as Pio.

Should I invest in a GTO trainer?

Everyone is different – some people love studying with Pio and the related tools that focus on GTO. If this describes you, you are willing to put in the necessary time AND you play lots of hands vs strong opponents, a GTO trainer could be a worthwhile investment. However as I mentioned above – don’t fall into the trap of believing your opponents are playing near-GTO. Even at the lower end of HSNL online (500 and 1kNL) anyone who plays and studies regularly will tell you that their opponents are using strategies that bear little resemblance to how a solver would play. At the very least, while training with a GTO solver you should be considering where a human player’s strategy would be different from the machines, and how you might use that difference to realise more equity in the pot.

That’s it for today, any questions feel free to drop them in the comments below.

GL out there!

D7

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