joelshitshow said
Max Silver was on a recent Thinking Poker podcast and talked about his app, Snap Shove. I’d get that and use the training mode. You’ll know pretty quick how good you are with GTO.

My understanding is most V’s are tighter than GTO, which means you can shove a little wider against those types.

This is true, but ‘GTO’ refers more to postflop play than push-fold. When you’re only playing push-fold, we would usually use the term ‘Nash equilibrium’, since Nash refers simply to the results of the calculations that tell us optimal push-fold ranges, whereas GTO play involves taking the best of all possible unexploitable lines, so it necessitates including options beyond push-fold.

For example, in every 15bb spot in poker, there are multiple unexploitable ways to play the hand. You can play it push-fold, and a Nash equilibrium calculation (done on HRC or ICMIZER) will tell us your unexploitable shoving range for that spot. But you can also play it by raising 2x, raising 2.1x, raising 2.2x, and so on, and there are different Nash equilibrium calculations for each possible raise sizing in that spot.

The GTO play in this situation is whichever of our Nash equilibrium strategies has the highest EV for us – in some spots it might be to play pure push-fold, and in some spots it might be to raise 2x or 3x or some other sizing with a balanced range. In postflop situations, because we have many more possible lines and sizings in each spot, we can be a lot more specific about GTO play.

The bottom line is that GTO play is about much more than making +EV plays with the hand we have. It involves playing our entire range in a way that constitutes a balanced and (ideally, but not always realistically) unexploitable strategy, and choosing between each of our potential unexploitable strategies for a certain situation in order to establish which strategy has the highest EV.

With reference to OP’s original question, if you have to ask yourself, “am I already playing GTO?”, the answer is almost certainly no. Nobody plays perfect GTO (in many spots we can’t even calculate it because our estimations of postflop GTO often rely on assumptions about preflop ranges), but if you’re not consciously trying to play closer to GTO, you most likely have a large number of massive leaks in your game that opponents could be exploiting – you’re just playing against players who aren’t good enough to exploit those leaks.