Unwrapping GTO Wizard’s Hidden Gems for 2025

A new year is upon us, which is classically the time that most people start thinking about their aspirations for the next 12 months. If you are a GTO Wizard customer, those plans will likely involve study-based goals.

Rather than write something about S.M.A.R.T. goal setting or becoming more accountable, I was much more interested in discovering how I could get more out of GTO Wizard in the next 12 months. So I rounded up some of the brightest content creators in our roster and asked them a simple question:

What feature of GTO Wizard should students be using more than they probably are?

Andrew Brokos – Zoom Out

“I always encourage the people I talk to (my coaching students and podcast listeners, primarily) to do more big-picture stuff. Spend more time with reports and less time looking at specific boards or, even worse, worrying about what specific combos are doing in specific spots. Drills are great for putting in volume, but I think they should be a starting point to help you identify spots where you’d benefit from a deeper analysis. I really like tools for visualizing ranges and range interactions: the equity distribution graphs, the Manhattan plots, and the EV Comparison strategy view.”

Andrew Brokos

Thinking Poker Podcast host

Andrew Brokos

Thinking Poker Podcast host

I completely agree with Andrew, especially on the reports. I believe you can fast-track a lot of learning just by looking at the flop reports.

For example, a very quick tour of the most commonly lead flops by the BB vs UTG in single-raised pots (SRP). Just open up the “Reports” tab, click on the ‘Bet 33%’ column header to sort, and it will put the leads in order:

Flop report: BB first-in vs UTG in SRP (sorted by frequency “Bet 33% pot”)

If we look through the flops, we see a lot of low-medium, connected boards. Flops that a BB calling range hits far more often than a preflop open-raiser from early position.

What are the most commonly overbet flops by UTG when the BB checks? Similarly, just click on the ‘Bet 125%’ column header, and you will see:

Flop report: UTG vs BB check in SRP (sorted by frequency “Bet 125% pot”)

Medium, rainbow boards with lots of possible straight draws. Boards where the UTG opener is likely ahead for now, but plenty of turn cards could significantly change that.

You get the idea, the reports are a very quick way of identifying broad trends.

Donk Orleone – Get Concrete

“What I like to do a lot is reviewing hands where I nodelock how I would try to build a reasonable range on every node for either player, then seeing what I can do to take advantage of such a strategy. I think, in general, players over-rely on abstract logic provided by GTO too much. Nodelocking helps a lot with learning to be concrete. I get very detailed, I build the range from absolute scratch, combo by combo often.”

Donk Orleone

Professional Poker Player

Donk Orleone

Professional Poker Player

I have to admit, I am as guilty as anyone of following the GTO guidance to the letter, patting myself on the back if I played my hand ‘correctly’ but forgetting entirely that my opponents rarely play anything close to equilibrium.

Nodelocking is the next frontier in poker strategy, especially with postflop ICM (incl. bounties). That feature is still relatively novel (at the time of writing), having only been available for a small amount of time at GTO Wizard, and I suspect it is underused.

Be careful though, there are a lot of pitfalls when nodelocking.

Uri Peleg – Unpack Uncertainty

“I think just going back and forth when navigating a tree. Often, you don’t understand why a combo does something – the answer lies in the villain’s response to what you’re doing.

Anything you don’t understand should make you curious, and anything you’re curious about should make you do some experimenting and research. If you see a combo you didn’t expect or a frequency you didn’t expect, you have to ask WHY. Otherwise, you’re missing the entire point.”

Uri Peleg

Head Coach Guerrilla Poker & Course Creator at Upswing Poker

“I think just going back and forth when navigating a tree. Often, you don’t understand why a combo does something – the answer lies in the villain’s response to what you’re doing.

Uri Peleg

Head Coach Guerrilla Poker & Course Creator at Upswing Poker

A poor way to use a tool like GTO Wizard is to line-check, i.e., to see if you were ‘right’ and then move on. A much better way to use a solver is to look for solutions that don’t make sense to you, then try and work out why the solver did what it did.

To echo what Uri said specifically about looking at the villain’s response, here is my favorite example of this from 2024 in my personal study, which I wrote about here.

This is the UTG c-bet strategy on a Q♥J♥5♥ flop against UTG1 who cold-called preflop.

UTG c-bet flop strategy vs UTG1 on QJ5m

I was curious about why A5s was a pure bet, because it made no sense to me. So, I looked at the UTG1 response:

UTG1 response vs UTG c-bet

It can make better hands (88–66) fold, it makes worse hands call (44–22, 65s, and flush draws), and it blocks strong hands like AA, AQ, AJ, and 55.

This is a classic merge-bet. Pausing and wondering why when confused allowed me to understand the concept of bets that can simultaneously make worse hands call and better hands fold. Since then, I actually believe most bets (on early streets) have some merge aspect, in the sense that most value hands still benefit from denial and most bluffs can improve to the best hand on later streets.

As Uri suggested, following curiosity can lead you to a valuable rabbit hole.

Kevin Rabichow – When Tailor-Made Becomes Convenient

“Everything custom solver. It’s honestly easier to find the answers I need by building a custom solution with automatic or dynamic settings, rather than searching through the solutions library. Not to mention, you always get the exact spot you wanted by building custom.”

Kevin Rabichow

High Stakes Poker Player and Coach

Kevin Rabichow

High Stakes Poker Player and Coach

Two months ago, I would have disagreed with this. While I used the custom solver more often, I always used it with fixed bet sizes and tried to replicate the same betting tree from the (presolved) solutions library. I felt that it showed the competing incentives of individual hand classes (for example, top pair hands tend to bet larger because they benefit from equity denial, sets tend to bet small because they are less worried about protection).

My coach, Dara O’Kearney, talked me out of this position. He is also a big proponent of using custom solutions all the way and using automatic bet sizing:

It’s faster
Identifies the main betting trends in a spot
It’s easier to implement in-game
Often, the EV difference with mixes of bet sizes is marginal.

So, I switched to the automatic bet size custom solves for everything and have not looked back.

Joey Ingram also told me his favorite feature was the custom solver, and it is no surprise that Kevin gave him a masterclass on how to use it in this video.

Matt Hunt – Have Your Ranges Evaluated

“I think the Range Builder is the most powerful tool on the site. I use it in a large percentage of my coaching sessions, it’s incredibly helpful for fleshing out concepts.

Generally not for constructing ranges for my students, it’s more a case of presenting a scenario and guiding them through the process of building the range themselves. Over the course of doing so, it often helps them figure out the flaws in their range construction, and also reinforces their confidence in the things they’re getting right.”

Matt Hunt

Coach at Poker Fluency and Solve For Why

“I think the Range Builder is the most powerful tool on the site. I use it in a large percentage of my coaching sessions, it’s incredibly helpful for fleshing out concepts.

Matt Hunt

Coach at Poker Fluency and Solve For Why

I couldn’t agree more with Matt. In fact, I have also written about the power of the Range Builder in my article on Learning Science. I think it is a more effective tool than doing drills because it forces you to consider all possible hands and design a strategy for an entire range rather than just for a specific hand.

Also, from the article, the range builder harnesses a learning technique called Retrieval Practice, which is when you try to summon up something you have already learned from memory. It improves your ability to recall that knowledge again at the tables. If you are unable to, you now know what you didn’t know (well enough); it exposes your weak areas that need more work.

Dr. Kamikaze – Drilling Into Common Spots

“I’m a big fan of the Trainer tool. It’s a great way to drill the most common spots that come up in tournaments, like big blind defense, which can shift so dramatically as stack sizes and tournament stages change. I also want to spend more time exploring the new AI post-flop solver. This new technology makes studying post-flop spots much more accessible, as it took a lot of time and resources with solvers to run post-flop simulations until this became available.”

Dr. Kamikaze

MTT Coach at Poker Mix

Dr. Kamikaze

MTT Coach at Poker Mix

I must admit I do not spend anywhere near enough time with the Trainer, but Dr. K is correct. Poker never had a form of practice of this quality until very recently. Given how costly making a mistake can be at the real money tables, we should all be making more of them in this no-stakes environment.

Especially as Dr. Kamikaze suggests for the most common spots. If you don’t think that is important, I implore you to check out the video on the right from Tombos21 and, in particular, his spot importance spreadsheet.

Simplifying Poker Strategy: Is It Worth It?

As you can see, single-raised pots (SRP) account for 22.93% of all spots in poker. SRPs between BTN and BB alone come up almost 5% of the time. You may think that the time you played a 5-bet pot, UTG vs UTG1, was important to drill because it cost you a lot, but those spots come up very rarely. Developing muscle memory for the spots that come up frequently is much more important.

Stoyan Obreshkov – Keep Exploring, Keep Discovering

“I plan to further develop my understanding of how to adjust the post-flop strategy based on the different stages of the tournament. I am studying a wide variety of situations in order to get a general understanding of what the ICM adjustments dictate and intuitively build on top of that, knowing the disadvantages of the ICM model. Furthermore, even the best players are far from equilibrium in that part of the game tree, so I believe nodelocking needs to be a crucial part of that study process.

With GTO Wizard, I have all of that being solved instantaneously with extremely high accuracy.”

Stoyan Obreshkov

MTT Player and Coach for GTO Wizard, CnC and Run It Once

With GTO Wizard, I have all of that being solved instantaneously with extremely high accuracy.”

Stoyan Obreshkov

MTT Player and Coach for GTO Wizard, CnC and Run It Once

A lot of my recent writing has been about postflop ICM (in fact, the first thing I ever wrote for GTO Wizard was on this topic). So naturally, I would echo what Stoyan is saying here. In particular, the fact that GTO Wizard launched postflop ICM with nodelocking has been a game changer.

If you don’t think postflop ICM needs to be studied, consider this.

Every example below is the following spot: CO opens with 30bb, BB calls with 45bb. The flop is 972r and the BB checks.

This is the spot in Chip EV:

CO c-bet flop strategy vs BB on 972r: Chip EV

This is the spot in an MTT with 100% of the field remaining:

CO c-bet flop strategy vs BB on 972r: ICM100

This is the spot in an MTT with 75% of the field remaining:

CO c-bet flop strategy vs BB on 972r: ICM75

This is the spot on the bubble:

CO c-bet flop strategy vs BB on 972r: ICM (money bubble)

And this is the spot at a final table:

CO c-bet flop strategy vs BB on 972r: ICM (final table)

The preflop ranges are obviously slightly different, but notably, the betting strategy is very different each time, and four different bet sizes are used.

Some people play a Chip EV style until near the bubble, but that is a clear leak, as Stoyan suggested. As a matter of fact, ICM changes optimal strategy from the very start of the tournament compared to Chip EV.

Stoyan rightly points out that it’s a very necessary thing to study in 2025.

Tombos21 – Factor in the Future

“Turn reports, especially when filtered for specific hole cards. This feature is incredibly powerful because it allows you to construct a coherent game plan from flop to river.

For example, consider this 100bb cash game spot: BB vs BTN on J44r. The BTN c-bets, the BB check-raises with A♥2♥, and the BTN calls. Now what? How should you proceed on the turn?

By using turn reports and filtering for this exact hand, we can see that the best cards to barrel are a 3 or 5, where A2 picks up a gutshot. Surprisingly, A2 almost always checks when the turn brings an Ace—despite it being the highest EV turn card. This illustrates an important concept: the best runouts aren’t always the ones that encourage aggression. With top pair and no kicker, you typically don’t want to build a massive pot.”

Tombos21

Poker Coach and Head Content Creator at GTO Wizard

“Turn reports, especially when filtered for specific hole cards. This feature is incredibly powerful because it allows you to construct a coherent game plan from flop to river.

For example, consider this 100bb cash game spot: BB vs BTN on J44r. The BTN c-bets, the BB check-raises with A♥2♥, and the BTN calls. Now what? How should you proceed on the turn?

Tombos21

Poker Coach and Head Content Creator at GTO Wizard

Turn report: BB first-in turn EVs (filtered for: A♥2♥) vs BTN on J44r (X-B33-R50-C)

Turn report: BB first-in turn strategies (filtered for: A♥2♥) vs BTN on J44r (X-B33-R50-C)

I knew that when I asked Tombos21 this question, I would get an answer I was not expecting. This one was alien to me, in fact, I didn’t even realize you could filter for specific hands.

This is one for my 2025 to-do list. The only thing I can add about turn reports is that I have found it a useful exercise in both in-study and in-game sessions to ask myself what the good and bad turn cards are for my range before we get to the turn.

In the lab, it’s a good way of testing my assumptions by comparing them with what the solver suggests. At the tables, it just prepares me for what I am going to do if the nightmare turn card hits, so I am not stumped in the moment.

Barry Carter – Learn Chunk Fu

“I wanted to end by sharing what I personally thought was the most valuable yet underused tool at GTO Wizard. Unfortunately for me, Matt Hunt got in there first with the Range Builder, which I think is the best tool of them all.

I do have a very close second, and that is the equity buckets feature. I always look at this first before I look at the strength of the range in general. It gives me a much broader overview of how the strategy is going to play out.”

Barry Carter

Poker Author at Simplify Poker

Barry Carter

Poker Author at Simplify Poker

For example, the IP player (on the right) has a massive range advantage and will be betting everything for a small size.

In this next example, the OOP player (on the left) has a polarized range and will be betting big with their value and bluffs, checking everything else:

And so on.

There are other buckets in GTO Wizard, like the hand buckets:

Again, before you start thinking of every individual hand combination, you can look at what groups of hands do. In this case, sets and two pair mostly bet, one pair hands mostly call, straight draws mix betting and calling, and so on.

The reason I like equity buckets is because trying to manage a whole range in your head can be overwhelming. The equity buckets harness a powerful learning technique called Chunking, which is a cognitive strategy that groups pieces of information together into more manageable ‘chunks.’

I wrote about this at length in my article on The Magic of Equity Buckets.

Author

Barry Carter

Barry Carter has been a poker writer for 16 years. He is the co-author of six poker books, including The Mental Game of Poker, Endgame Poker Strategy: The ICM Book, and GTO Poker Simplified.

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