Lorena Spurio for Vox

Thousands of poker players gathered in Las Vegas this month for their biggest tournament series of the year: the World Series of Poker. And today, the players who’ve survived until the end will compete for $10 million at the final table.

Those who’ve made it to the final table needed a fair bit of luck. But many are also

diligent students of the game who have spent thousands of hours drilling the most optimal strategies — often with the help of a computer.

“It used to be that poker was a game played by degenerates, people who live on the edge,” said Doug Polk, a professional player who has won a WSOP event three times. “But what's funny about that is, if you boil down poker to its essence, it's a math game. And so that means that nerds are going to eventually win.”

Today’s best players are usually trying to play, albeit imperfectly, a strategy computer algorithms have revealed as “game theory optimal, or, what players call “GTO” — the mathematically proven way to become unexploitable to other players while maximizing winnings. How closely players can hew to GTO can often determine their success, especially since the competition has never been fiercer: Anyone can now study GTO with an app on their phone.

But has the relentless pursuit of optimization also made poker a bit… robotic?

Bryan Steffy/Getty Images for World Series of Poker (WSOP)

Poker is a game of incomplete information. Players know there are 52 cards in a deck, divided into four suits with 13 cards each. While they can calculate the probabilities of certain cards being in their opponent's hand or appearing on the table, they cannot know these outcomes for certain.

The choices they make around whether to fold, check, bet — and how much to bet — depend on these probabilities, as well as their anticipation of how their opponents will play.

Historically, poker players primarily relied on intuition and experience to make these decisions.

Now, players practice finding the optimal course of action for any situation by running past hands through computer programs like PioSolver or Simple Postflop, and by asking these tools to spit out optimal strategies in a certain scenario. They can also play against a computer with apps like GTO Wizard, which will then tell them what they should have done to play optimally. With repetition, GTO strategies start to sink in.

“Some top players spend hours running simulations and memorizing the solutions,” said Liv Boeree, a former professional poker player and the only woman in history to win both a WSOP event and a European Poker Tour event. “This is vastly different to the old school days where players ‘trained’ through playing, and perhaps honing, general principles. We now have access to much more granular data on optimal play in specific situations.”

No human can actually play perfect GTO strategy. Performing the necessary calculations without the help of a computer is just too complicated. That’s because there are an astronomical number of game states in poker: depending on the betting rules and the number of their chips, a player can make a bet of any size and so can their opponents, and there are 2,598,960 possible hands. In practice, players are only approximating GTO — and at best, that’s what their opponents are doing as well. This means that players can deviate from textbook GTO to exploit weaknesses in other players and maximize their profits. 

Some players do this exceptionally well. Take Phil Ivey or Daniel Negreanu, who came on the scene before GTO was widespread but are still top poker players known for their abilities to read and exploit their opponents. But deviating from GTO can also be risky, because it can backfire and open a player to exploitation themselves.

“The beauty of poker is that there are so many different situations that can arise and so many different ways to think about the different spots and the combinations of hands and how likely things are that even if you're really good, you're going to be constantly making mistakes,” Polk said. 

At the same time, however, Polk said that even simplified GTO strategies can allow a player to reap many of the benefits of textbook GTO. So that means that, for most successful players, “poker has become more about executing the math and those strategies at a high level, rather than staring your opponent down in the eye and knowing that he doesn't have the goods.”

Louis Grasse/PxImages/Icon Sportswire/Getty Images

Not all of the changes wrought by GTO are for the better of the game. For one, it raises a practical problem: it’s now easier to cheat than ever, especially online. 

But beyond cheating, some players think that GTO has changed the soul of poker in a way that makes it less fun to play.

“I think it's worse for the game, frankly, because the days of just no one having any idea are gone,” said Polk, who has somewhat stepped back from the game and focused on his businesses after playing what he estimates to be 7 to 8 million hands of poker in his lifetime.

Boeree agrees that GTO “takes away a bit of [poker’s] romantic Wild West character.” But she said it’s not all bad; just different.

For one thing, GTO players tend to play more aggressively than old-school players. That’s because GTO players tailor their bet sizes to extract maximum value from their strong hands by encouraging calls from worse hands, using bluffs to keep opponents guessing and prevent exploitation.

This can be exciting to watch in that it frequently leads to bigger pots, crazier bluffs, and dramatic showdowns. For amateurs who don’t know what they’re doing, it’s a lot easier to make costly mistakes when facing GTO opponents. Sometimes, hands are resolved more quickly because a big bet can intimidate players into folding. But thinking through GTO strategy on the spot can also be time-consuming, making some hands go slower. 

The democratization of poker knowledge has made top players’ “edges much smaller and the competition fierce,” Boeree said. If every player at a table is playing GTO, the play becomes more about focusing on maintaining GTO and less about reading opponents, which can seem mechanical.

“I'd argue it's also made it more intellectually fascinating, as the mathematical building blocks of the game are now truly visible for the first time,” she said. “There's still plenty of room for creativity, especially in live play where you're dealing with real human faces and emotions. Even the best players still make mistakes!”

For more on poker, and its increased reliance on math, check out my feature story here.

 — Nicole Narea, senior writer

Thierry Falise/LightRocket/Getty Image

Sean Illing talks with political science professor Matt McManus about the political thought of Friedrich Nietzsche, the 19th-century German philosopher with a complicated legacy.

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