How to Study GTO Solutions

Tools like GTO Wizard and other solvers should not be used to memorize specific strategies. There are simply far too many scenarios to memorize. Instead, these tools are best used to understand big-picture concepts such as stack depth, range advantage, nut advantage, bet sizing, and position. By approaching your study with a scientific mindset and using the scientific method as a guide, you can make the most of your study sessions and come away with valuable, actionable conclusions.

Pose a Question

Any of these could be made even more specific by specifying stack depth, positions, or preflop actions. As with any scientific experiment, the goal is to identify a specific variable you will test while keeping everything else the same.

Research Relevant Concepts (optional)

This step is labeled optional because you may feel comfortable forming a hypothesis already. If so, you can skip ahead to that step. But if you feel lost to even guess at an answer to your question, then you will benefit from studying the relevant theory before digging into solver work. This will help you better interpret the results of your experiment.

For example, if you wanted to investigate “How does stack depth influence continuation betting strategy when in position in a single raised pot?” you might benefit from reading up on range advantage, continuation betting, and stack-to-pot ratio.

Formulate Your Hypothesis

Before you start looking at specific data and scenarios, take a crack at answering your question for yourself. As before, it’s best to be specific. Make predictions about bet sizes, betting frequency, and which hands will bet most often on specific flops. You may even want to write down your predictions.

The goal here is to commit to a theory you will test. It’s easy once you start looking at specific scenarios, to nod along and convince yourself it’s all common sense and pretty much what you expected to see and that you understand it now. You’ll retain the information better if you force yourself to articulate your initial understanding of the problem and then see what surprises you. That feeling of “Oh! I thought it would be X, but actually it’s Y” will help new knowledge stick in your brain and, most importantly, make itself available the next time you’re in that situation with real money on the line.

Test Your Hypothesis

If you formulated your question well, you’ve already isolated a single variable you will test. If not, this is your chance to get more specific. In this step, you will conduct an experiment designed to either corroborate your hypothesis or send you back to the drawing board.

Changing more than one variable at once will confound your results. For example, if you look at continuation betting as BTN vs BB at 40BB effective on a K♦ 8♦ 2♠ flop and try to compare it to continuation betting as UTG vs BB at 100BB effective on the same flop, you won’t know whether the differences you observe are a result of changing the stack size, changing the starting ranges, or both.

This article offers a helpful overview of the many tools and displays available within GTO Wizard to help you choose the one(s) most relevant to your experiment. For example, this report offers a graphical overview of the BTN’s continuation betting strategy on every flop when heads up against the BB, 60BB deep, in a single-raised MTT pot. By comparing it to the same overview at a different stack depth, you can look for patterns and surprising anomalies that may tell you something about how stack depth changes the BTN’s continuation betting strategy.

Analyze the Results

Compare the results of your experiment to your hypothesis 👨‍🏫 Where were your predictions accurate? What did you miss or get wrong? Record the results of your experiment in as much detail as you can, paying particular attention to anything that surprised you or was not in keeping with your hypothesis. Outliers are promising candidates for theory building because they defy expected cause-and-effect relationships. Explore why these outliers break the norm.

Draw Conclusions

You probably won’t come away with an answer as crisp and clean as “Always continuation bet more often with deeper stacks”. You may notice a general trend towards betting more or less often, or towards using bigger or larger sizes for bets, but you may also notice exceptions to that trend.

As with the hypothesis, it’s best to be as specific as possible here. Focus on actionable takeaways:

What will you do differently as a result of what you have learned?

Give yourself specific goals, such as “Slowplay more often at low SPRs” or “Look for opportunities to overbet the flop with high SPRs”.

Conclusions lead to new questions and hypotheses

Those specific theories and explanations you articulated above? Those can also function as hypotheses for a new round of studying! Having reached a new understanding of continuation betting (or whatever topic you investigated), it’s time to test and further refine that understanding. Are you right about which flops call for bigger bet sizes with deeper stacks? Are you right about which hands belong in those bigger continuation betting ranges? Test your hypothesis to find out!