Do You Think Studying GTO Is Essential for Today’s Games?

There’s always a big debate in the poker world about whether GTO study is a must-have for modern players or if strong exploitative play is enough to stay ahead of the field.
Do you think recreational players can succeed without GTO knowledge, or is it becoming unavoidable as the game evolves?
What’s your personal approach to studying – solvers, hand reviews, coaching, or just playing and learning from experience?

The question you have to ask yourself is exploit from what? If you have not studied GTO then you are guessing at the ranges to exploit
Informed ranges allow us to be more precise and therefore gain more value with our exploits.
NL is a game where we will be put in spots where we have to wager our entire stacks, more info in those spots is always better.
Knowing our ranges well allows us to more quickly determine our V's mistakes. We can extrapolate from a single hand the error of our V's thinking. You have to play hundreds even thousands of hours to get the same skill set. All the while risking your $

eetenor said:

The question you have to ask yourself is exploit from what? If you have not studied GTO then you are guessing at the ranges to exploit
Informed ranges allow us to be more precise and therefore gain more value with our exploits.
NL is a game where we will be put in spots where we have to wager our entire stacks, more info in those spots is always better.
Knowing our ranges well allows us to more quickly determine our V's mistakes. We can extrapolate from a single hand the error of our V's thinking. You have to play hundreds even thousands of hours to get the same skill set. All the while risking your $

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Even without that, how would you even play against opponents you have no read on if you don't know GTO?

Moreover, understanding GTO is understanding how to be unexploitable. If you know GTO and understand (!) it well, you can without much effort calculate what adjustments to make if your opponent deviates in any way.

And, honestly, it's hard to imagine how would you learn decent exploits without first learning GTO play. GTO play basically introduces you to the concept of ranges and how they compete and modify as the game progresses. Without it it will just either be a complete vibe-play, or you will be just stuck to your specific field, exploits of which tendencies you memorized over time and vaguely understand.

Hello, personally, he applies the rules that are worth knowing about GTO, but he does not apply it 100%.

I think that at micro limits this is unlikely to be useful, but for development I think it is necessary to study this.