| ThinkGTO Think Deeper. Play Sharper. | |||||
| A big welcome to everyone who joined this week. We loaded this issue with real value: a free two-week unlock of our apps to start, five brand new free tools, and a dense hit of strategy. Let us get into it. | |||||
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5 New Free Tools This Week | |||||
| We shipped a stack of free, no-signup browser tools. Bookmark the ones you need: | |||||
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Lead Story | |||||
| Blind vs Blind, the pot you play most and worst. Every orbit that folds around, you are contesting a pot with one structural quirk almost nobody accounts for: the small blind raises, but plays the whole hand out of position. We decoded the 100bb solutions in GTO Ranges+. The SB actually has three options, not two: it raises 33.1%, completes 20.5%, and folds the rest. The big blind then defends a huge 55.5% because it closes the action, gets a price, and has position. And after the flop the out-of-position small blind c-bets only about a third even on its best board, and under 6% on a low connected one. | |||||
| Read the full breakdown → | |||||
Strategy Spotlight: Final-Table ICM | |||||
| At a final table, chips stop being worth their face value, and that changes every range. The chip leader can open wider because it risks chips, not its tournament life, while covered stacks must tighten. Here is the flip side: how the big blind should defend when a 25bb button min-raises into it under final-table ICM, straight from GTO Ranges+. | |||||
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| Want to see the ICM math for your exact table? Our new ICM Calculator shows each stack's real equity and the risk premium on any all-in, so you know exactly how much extra you need to call. | |||||
Hand of the Week | |||||
| Cutoff, 100bb: A-Ten offsuit, and the button keeps three-betting. ATo is a perfectly fine cutoff open. But when the player on your left three-bets, it becomes a fold: it flops top pair with a weak kicker out of position, dominated by the exact hands that three-bet it, and it makes a poor four-bet bluff. Facing the three-bet, the cutoff opening range continues just 73% of the time, and the hands it folds first are the offsuit broadways like ATo, KJo and QJo. The fix against a maniac on your left is not to tighten everything, it is to cut those specific hands. Build the exact range in the Range Calculator. | |||||
Tool Tip | |||||
| Stuck in a downswing and not sure if it is variance or a leak? Plug your win rate and standard deviation into the new Variance Calculator. At a 5bb/100 win rate with 100 bb/100 standard deviation, a 20 buy-in downswing is a normal, expected event, not a sign you are broken. Seeing the math is the fastest cure for tilt. Pair it with the Bankroll Calculator to size your roll for the swings. | |||||
This Week in Poker | |||||
| The WSOP Main Event final table drew a crowd. Watch parties broke down every hand as the August Nine played it out, and if you followed along, the final-table ICM spotlight above is the map to understanding the folds. Elsewhere the coaching world kept circling two evergreen ideas worth stealing: you do not have to c-bet every flop as the preflop aggressor, and running it twice changes your variance but not your long-run EV. Both are small mindset shifts that quietly save money. | |||||
Put It Into Practice | |||||
| Redeem code ACES above, drill the ICM ranges in GTO Ranges+, read more on the blog, or come talk hands on Discord. | |||||
| Unlock the apps with ACES → | |||||
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