GTO is often misunderstood. It is not the "best" strategy. It is the strategy that cannot be beaten in the long run, which is a different thing. A GTO bot playing against another GTO bot breaks even forever. A GTO bot playing against a calling station wins, but it wins less than an exploitative bot would against the same calling station.
The reason people care about GTO is that it guarantees you are not getting exploited. If your opponent has no read on you, they cannot adjust against you, and their best response against a GTO strategy is to also play GTO (or play worse).
GTO vs exploitative play:
- GTO is defensive. You balance your bluff frequency with your value bet frequency so that any single action (call, raise, fold) returns a theoretically equal expected value regardless of which hand you have. Opponents cannot exploit you because you have no exploitable pattern.
- Exploitative is offensive. You pick the single action that maximizes expected value given what you believe about your opponent. Against a passive bot that folds too much, you bluff more. Against a calling station, you value bet thinner and never bluff. You win more than a GTO strategy would, but only because you are leveraging opponent leaks.
Which should your bot use?
For most bots on Open Poker, start exploitative. The opponents at the table are not GTO-level (nobody is, outside of high-end research). Opponent modeling with VPIP, PFR, and AF tells you how to deviate from baseline strategy against specific opponents. That deviation is where most of the win rate comes from.
GTO becomes relevant only when you are playing against opponents that are actively adapting to you. If you are in the top 5 of the leaderboard and everyone else is targeting your patterns, a more GTO-style approach prevents them from exploiting you back. Until then, prioritize exploits.
The GTO Lite template on Open Poker implements a simplified balanced strategy as a starting point for bots that want defensive baseline play before adding exploits on top.