Alec Torelli: Poker Game Theory vs. Exploitative Play

(Photo: Italiapokerclub.com)

With every new piece of content that Alec Torelli produces, he's establishing himself more and more as a "thinking man's poker vlogger". While other poker players who are actively using social media, tend to forgot the education for the sake of entertainment Torelli manages to combine the two by sharing a lot of valuable knowledge with his viewers without overwhelming them with boring technical poker lingo. His recent video about poker game theory and exploitative play perfectly showcases the above-mentioned trend.

GTO vs. Exploitative Play

Torelli explains in simple terms the difference between game theory optimal and exploitative play using the example of rock-paper-scissors. Throwing a rock, paper, and scissors one-third of the time each cannot be exploited by other players and when playing against a thinking opponent this is precisely the strategy one should assume since every other approach would result in a loss. However, when playing against someone who throws scissors roughly half the time falling back on the game theory optimal strategy - while safe - won't net us the best results and we should increase the frequency with which we're using 'rock' to exploit our opponent's strategy as much as possible.

Poker is much more complicated than rock-paper-scissors, but the idea presented above still holds true. When playing against an extremely tough and knowledgable high-stakes online cash game player (or when playing in an unknown environment) it's a good idea to try to play our best approximation of the game theory optimal strategy since we either can't hope to exploit our opponent or we don't have enough information to do that yet. Conversely in a live cash game full of recreational players trying to play game theory optimal would be extremely counterproductive, and instead, we should aim to exploit our opponent's mistakes.

Reality Check

In the words of a famous Pixar villain:

"When everyone's super no one will be!"

When the GTO strategy for the popular poker formats becomes widely available to everyone there will no longer be a point in playing poker for money. Fortunately, poker is not rock-paper-scissors and we're still nowhere near figuring out what's actually the game theory optimal strategy for complex poker formats like six-handed no-limit cash games.

Sure, there are some extremely knowledgable players out there - particularly in the high-stakes head's up cash games - capable of playing pretty damn close to what we'd call the GTO strategy, but if we ignore the outliers and focus on what the average poker player has to deal with the good old exploitative play is still the king. Alec Torelli is using the exploitative approach almost exclusively in the context of high-stakes live cash games and tournaments which might be a good reality check for poker enthusiasts thinking that game theory is the key to beating NL50 online or their local 1/2$ casino cash game.