I wanted to follow up on my last blog post and share with you a few screenshots showing how powerful our new “GTO-style” bots will be.
We’ve been working on these GTO bots for years now and are working toward a launch date of October 1st. The new bots will be included with your paid Advanced Poker Training (APT) membership. So if you don’t have a full membership now is the time to get one.
GTO Bot Example
I’m going to show one situation you might encounter with the new bots in this article. I’ve chosen a hand where I got dealt A♠-J♠. Although covered by the advice panel in the picture below, the button is two to my left, so I’m in the hijack. I open-raised and got called by the big blind who then donk bets into me on the flop.
This is kind of an unusual situation already, because the flop is pretty favorable to me. I’m thus expecting most players to check pretty much everything to me from the big blind. But we need to prepare for anything, including players who donk bet on a board like this. So I’ve clicked the advice button to see how my advisor recommends I reply.
GTO Bot Advisors
The first thing you’ll notice in the advice pop-up is that it looks familiar if you’ve used our PLO site, Omaha Poker Training. The GTO bot advisor is giving you some important information here. You can see our hand value, which is a measure of how strong our hand is right now. The hand value is calculated as if there were no more cards to come. For this hand, our value is 50%, which makes sense because there are certainly many hands in our range that already have one pair or better. But given that we have ace high, there are certainly many worse hands as well.
The calculation for outs is 98%, as we have an overcard and the nut flush draw. This means that our drawing potential is better than 98% of the other hands in our range at this point. The hand strength calculation combines our hand value and our outs, but is not just the average of the two. More on that another time. Below that we see our stack to pot ratio, the current pot odds we’re being offered to call this bet, and our advisor’s recommendation, which is to raise.
Nothing too exciting yet. But now we click on the “Show My Range” button, and we see the magic, which should look a little familiar to you if you’ve worked with a solver before. This screen shows the entire range of hands that we would have raised with preflop from this position, and how we are going to reply to this donk bet with every one of them.
Looking at the left column, we can see that we’re raising with about 11% of our range, calling with 55%, and folding 34%. Even though we do have a range advantage on this flop, we don’t plan to blast our opponent with raises when we have absolutely nothing (though I’m sure there are some players out there who would try this tactic). But these bots know that discretion is the better part of valor. We can see the raise recommendations in green across the chart. With our sets (KK, 55, 22) you can see we’re raising about half the time and calling the other half to trap. We’re also raising with pocket aces, and some top pair top kicker combos. (Remember, the flop was 5♠-K♠-2♥)
Hover-Over Feature
Most of the other raises are our flush draws, which you can see if you hover over an individual hand. For example, here I’ll hover over A3s, which is the most interesting of the bunch because it’s got three different colors, as does A4s. And we see why: the advisor recommends you raise with the combo draw (A♠-3♠), call with A♥-3♥, which has a gutshot and the backdoor nut flush draw, and fold the other two. Very cool!
The hands in yellow across the chart are the calling hands. This includes all of our lesser top pair hands, most pairs, and even some high cards like AQ. The advisor tells us to fold all the garbage that completely missed.
It might seem a bit passive to just call with so many top pair hands. This is definitely something to think about. Frankly, this is exactly the purpose of these bots: to get you thinking! The advisor believes we maximize the value of hands like KQ by keeping our opponent’s range wide, controlling the size of the pot, and using our position to get them to showdown (though it wouldn’t be surprising to me if the advisor recommended we bet if checked to on the turn).
More information on GTO Bots Coming Soon!
I will stop here for now. In future training materials I’ll talk more about the best way to learn from our GTO bots and new advisors. One way of course would be to do this analysis on your own beforehand, and then look at the advisor’s recommendation and see how your analysis compared to theirs. You might also consider any hands with a mixed strategy (any of the hands in the chart that have multiple colors), and before hovering over a hand, try to predict which combos are being raised, called, or folded, and why.
I hope that you are as excited as I am about our new GTO bots and advanced advisors! I think they will bring a whole new level of training to your poker game. Subscribe to this blog (on the right side of the page) to get updates on our GTO bot progress, more tips for use of the new advisors, and general strategy articles by myself and some of APT’s great coaches.
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