Eh I don’t think we disagree on anything fundamental - and I hadn’t considered the collusive case so I’m glad you brought it up.
I see good poker players lose to bad players in a single session all the time. Even if you are crushing with a +15 BB/100 hand winrate you’re still going to lose 30-40% of your sessions. That is not an indication of negative EV.
I’ve never seen someone who understood poker very well have a losing record over a long period of time against bad players. I don’t disagree about humans never playing actual GTO, which is why I use phrases like “remotely close” to optimal. My point is that the bar is low enough that any reasonable deep attempt at learning and approximating optimal play should clear the bar to be +EV against bad players.
Parent comment says “if you’re playing GTO against clowns you’ll go broke because they are too bad and you are too GTO.” I strongly disagree with this - the reason you have negative EV is not because you are “too GTO.” If you losing money in expectation you are just not very good at the game yet. What is needed is to understand the game better (and moving closer to optimal play is a reasonable goal). I suspect you agree on this - any reasonably good player should have positive EV against fish, regardless of whether they go out of their way to exploit.
I see good poker players lose to bad players in a single session all the time. Even if you are crushing with a +15 BB/100 hand winrate you’re still going to lose 30-40% of your sessions. That is not an indication of negative EV.
I’ve never seen someone who understood poker very well have a losing record over a long period of time against bad players. I don’t disagree about humans never playing actual GTO, which is why I use phrases like “remotely close” to optimal. My point is that the bar is low enough that any reasonable deep attempt at learning and approximating optimal play should clear the bar to be +EV against bad players.
Parent comment says “if you’re playing GTO against clowns you’ll go broke because they are too bad and you are too GTO.” I strongly disagree with this - the reason you have negative EV is not because you are “too GTO.” If you losing money in expectation you are just not very good at the game yet. What is needed is to understand the game better (and moving closer to optimal play is a reasonable goal). I suspect you agree on this - any reasonably good player should have positive EV against fish, regardless of whether they go out of their way to exploit.