James 'SplitSuit' Sweeney is a poker player, coach, and author dedicated to helping players think deeper and win more.
As a co-founder of Red Chip Poker and creator of numerous strategy resources — including The Poker Bank YouTube channel — he’s known for turning complex poker theory into clear, actionable advice.
What if there were a way to defeat a perfect GTO strategy? We have been conditioned to think that GTO is the perfect style, completely unbeatable in every sense.
Mathematically, this might be true, but math is only a single aspect of poker. It turns out that the correct counter-strategy can totally destroy a perfect GTO game.
Really? Did we write that correctly?
But GTO is completely unbeatable, right?
You will know by the end of this article.
Success probabilities
As poker players, we understand that there is a probability of success associated with each of our plays. When we bluffcatch the river, we will often lose. When we bluff the river, our opponent will often call.
Losing the hand does not necessarily indicate that we have made a bad play. Our bluffcatches and bluffs will be profitable in the long run, provided they succeed at the right frequency.
But what if we could always be right?
What if our bluffs always worked and we only called rivers when we had the best of it?
With such powerful exploits, we would be able to beat any game. But of course, such techniques do not exist, right?
An amazing hero call
The media portrays poker hand reading as a mystical process where one player gazes into their opponent’s soul and just knows the exact two cards they are holding.
Good players know that this is not how hand reading works in practice. We need to put our opponent on a range, and narrow that range throughout the course of a hand. Wildly guessing that our opponent has a specific holding is a great way to lose chips fast.
Equally, we sometimes see big names in poker making insane hero calls, especially in live games. A solver would say such calls are theoretically terrible. And yet, when such decisions work out, they are often hailed as some of the best decisions in poker.
So, what is the truth here? Are these amazingly good decisions? Or bad decisions that get lucky?
We probably should not be too surprised if, in most cases, these are just straight-up bad plays that don’t win often enough according to the pot odds. They look amazing when they work, but lose chips fast in the long run.
But what if hero had a legitimate reason to narrow villain’s range far more than theory would suggest? Now the hero call is excellent. The human was able to see something that even a solver could not.
The intuitive realm
When thinking about poker hands, most elite players break their analysis down into a simple set of variables. The following is a list of some of those variables. In particular, variables that a GTO solver also has access to.
- Our hand
- Flop texture/runout
- Bet sizings used by either player
- Formation (positions) of all players
- Line used so far in the hand
- Villain’s possible range
- Current SPR/effective stacks
- Relevant villain or population data (through user input or node locking)
This list of variables alone is enough to create a strong framework for making decisions. We will employ some of these variables in the second half of this book.
However, there are additional variables we can add to our list. Humans have access to the following variables, which a solver has no ability to perceive.
- Physical tells
- Timing tells
- Bet-sizing tells
- Profile-based reads
- Recent game history; awareness of table dynamics
- Physical villain appearance, avatar, screen name
- The ability to provoke a specific reaction from villain through sizing, timing, chat, or body language
- Intangible data streams at the subconscious level (more on this later)
- Understanding of psychology and body language
We will refer to the variables that are unavailable to the solver as the intuitive realm.
Some live players have become exceptionally good at narrowing an opponent’s range more efficiently than a solver by observing physical tells and body language. They may also claim that they have the ability to manipulate their opponent into taking certain actions using speech (known as speechplay) or reverse tells.
Online players might narrow their opponent’s range further than a solver with timing tells, bet-sizing tells, and an intuitive understanding of recent game history. Some online players even claim they can preempt the exact moment their opponent will tilt.
It is unlikely we will be bluffing or bluffcatching with 100% accuracy as a result of these extra variables. But we take a step forward when we acknowledge that poker is far more than a game of dry math.
Subconscious data streams
As we have seen, it can be difficult to examine every aspect of the intuitive realm with math. Take online timing tells as an example. We will not necessarily have access to data points that map our opponent’s specific timing pattern with a precise holding or category of hand. (Although software attempts have been made to address this specific area of the game in the past.)
We may instead notice a subconscious feeling that our opponent has a specific type of holding based on their timing pattern. When asked why, we may struggle to explain the exact reasons.
It turns out that our subconscious mind is far more efficient at processing information than our rational brain. While estimates of the processing speed of the conscious and subconscious brain vary between studies, typical results indicate that the subconscious processes information around 25,000 times faster than the conscious mind.
There is a very real chance that our subconscious is able to pick up on an aspect of a poker hand that our conscious mind is not. Harnessing the power of that subconscious processing during the course of a hand could prove to be exceptionally powerful. If we could parse every single byte of data, we might discover that each of our opponent’s hand categories has its own unique signature. We would be able to 'see' our opponents’ hole cards.
The difficulty in practice is understanding which subconscious data is relevant and trustworthy. The subconscious mind of a weak player is usually more of a hindrance. Like the rational mind, our subconscious mind needs training before it can be considered an asset.
After all, recreational players often have a subconscious reason for why they make that ridiculous, clearly losing, hero call. Their subconscious is home to a host of cognitive biases that influence play based on bogus ideas about the game.
The way we help a recreational player to improve initially is by asking them to ignore their subconscious leanings and make plays based on concrete, rational data.
Full circle
A new player focuses excessively on villain’s precise holding. This is a leak because the new player does not yet have the skillset to understand when it is reasonable to narrow villain’s range to the point of a single hand or category of hands.
We eventually learn that putting our opponent on individual hands is a good way to burn chips fast and we start to use broader hand ranges. Our winrate improves, but we start to become closed off to the idea that we can ever pinpoint villain’s exact holding.
In reality, though, our opponent does not have a range. They have one specific holding. Our ultimate objective is still to figure out what that holding is. Imagine how well we could play if we knew. The only reason we make use of ranges is that we do not have enough skill or data to pinpoint our opponent’s precise holding.
In some sense, we have now gone full circle. We are revisiting an objective we initially trained ourselves to avoid: putting our opponent on a precise hand. We should only revisit this objective as an experienced player. Our subconscious will be better trained and less prone to cognitive biases.
At this point, we have the humility to understand that identifying a fairly broad range is the best we can hope for. Unlike recreational players, we will avoid sweeping conclusions when we do not have enough data to narrow a range further.
As a starting point, when putting villain on a range, also ask the question “what is my opponent’s most likely hand?” Do this at each decision point.
As we approach later streets and commitment decisions, we may sometimes be surprised to notice how strongly certain opponents are telegraphing their precise hand. We do not want to ignore this data simply because poker textbooks say we must always think in terms of ranges.
The exploit to GTO
We have slowly become conditioned to think that GTO is the perfect, completely unbeatable strategy.
This concept is such a blindfold that 99% of players have never reflected enough to realize that GTO (both bluffing and value betting) is not the strongest possible way of playing. The ultimate strategy is the one that knows villain’s hole cards; let us call it clairvoyant poker. It is the best possible exploitative poker style.
Clairvoyant poker is more of an ideal than a reality, of course. We will never know villain’s exact hand in every spot. But this is the ultimate goal that we should be working towards, even if we never reach it.
Any player who instead works toward the inferior GTO strategy will, at some point, find their progress capped. This is not to say we should not spend time studying solver output. Solvers are a powerful asset in understanding the mechanics of poker.
But the clairvoyant player destroys the GTO opponent with exceptionally high winrates. If we can 'see' our opponents’ hole cards, we will completely dominate them.
Up until this point, some readers may have imagined that a superuser account (sees all hole cards) would at best break even against a GTO strategy.
This is not even close to being true.
Of course, the disclaimer is that playing clairvoyantly implies we are able to scrape data from the intuitive realm. Some might counter that a perfect GTO opponent with glaring physical tells or other types of data leaks is not truly a perfect GTO player, even if they take all the right lines. After all, a GTO solver does not leak information through tells.
This is an expanded excerpt from the book The Exploitative Edge. The book dives into hand examples, player pool data, and more, so you develop a deeper edge in today’s games that’s not reliant on memorizing endless GTO solves!
