The Fastest Path to an Exceptional Win Rate

27 Jun 2025

Intermediate

This material is for medium-skilled players

Especially at mid stakes and below, the fastest way to achieve an exceptional win rate isn't by trying to play closer to GTO. Learning game theory and applying it is an essential part of becoming a great player — but it’s also very hard. What actually has the biggest impact on your winrate? In this topic, we're exploring which area of your game can increase your profits the most.

After analyzing tens of millions of hands at mid stakes and lower, I can tell you that there's a much easier way to maximize your earning quickly, you’ll want to be a treasure hunter. 

In this hand, Nacho opens from the hijack, and Danil Vasiliev 3-bets   in the small blind. Nacho calls:

Both players are some of the best in the world, so assuming preflop ranges that are close to GTO will be our best guess. However, in an extended research project I did on population preflop tendencies, I discovered that this is not the case for most spots that occur at mid stakes and below. So, you would already be able to adjust your preflop ranges and exploit the average regular’s preflop mistakes.

However, for this specific spot, the best exploitative range you could play from the small blind actually doesn't differ much from the GTO solution. So in this hand, this is not the spot where the treasure is hidden.

On the flop, Danil c-bets 55% pot, which is a slightly worse option than betting 30% in theory. A 30% bet would make better use of the small blind’s overall range advantage by forcing Nacho to call more hands. That allows Danil to get more value not only with his great hands, but also with his good to medium hands like weak top pairs and underpairs.

His actual hand does benefit from the additional fold equity that a bigger bet achieves. And as a treasure hunter, using different bet sizes according to what they achieve is an exploit that can be used to increase your overall profitability. It's like finding little nuggets of gold that fill your pockets with small profits.

But of course, this is a huge sin according to GTO and should therefore only be used against weaker players. Aware opponents — who don’t even have to be on Nacho’s level — will figure this imbalance out over time. So using only one c-bet size not only protects you from being re-exploited, but also reduces your number of decisions.

The deuce on the turn has to slow Danil down, because the hijack improves to a lot more straights than the small blind:

5-4 suited and ace-4 suited simply make up a bigger portion of the hijack’s range than the small blind’s. And while Nacho’s worst hand would at least be a gutshot here, Danil will still have hands exactly like this — air balls with very little equity — which makes the bottom part of his range worse than Nacho’s.

So, Danil’s range can only c-bet 25% of the time, assuming he'd bet GTO Wizard’s most preferred size of 80% pot. Against a check, the hijack would have basically no reason not to bet any hand that is two pair or better:

Instead, checks would come from some top pairs at best, and a lot of hands that hope to make it to showdown or are looking to complete their draw. 

And this is where you can show how much of a treasure hunter you are. Because if you played this hand on mid stakes or lower, arriving at this spot means you just found a chest. But that doesn't mean anything yet. You could simply ignore it, not thinking anything of it. Or, even if you think — or know — that there's a treasure in it, you could simply not have the key to open it, which would mean no profit for you.

In poker, the hidden treasure is being in this node you've gotten into. Because the average player on mid stakes and lower makes a big mistake in this exact spot. And knowing of that mistake is being aware that there’s a treasure in this chest. And knowing how to exploit it is literally the key to your profit.

So what is it? Well, in this line — the call-check-fold node in 3-bet pots in position on Ace-high boards — population overfolds against the bet by around 10 percentage points. Instead of folding 40% of their range on average, which would be the GTO frequency, they fold 50% of their range. It is a huge opportunity for us, as the out-of-position three-bettor, to exploit them.

And how do we do that? Of course — by bluffing more often. But how much more often? Do we just bet every bluff we have in our range? Or do we add one or two more? And which ones would be the best? Let’s have a look next.

GTO Betting Frequencies

So in GTO, assuming we only bet 75% of the pot or check, we see that the GTO frequency would be betting a little bit more than 50% of the time here.

• Top pairs and better would mix bets and checks.
• Underpairs (all those pocket pairs) would mostly check.
• Second pairs and worse — basically, our bluffing hands — would also mostly check.

But King-highs especially are the biggest bluffs. And then everything worse than that would mix in bluffs about 40% of the time.

Looking at how the hijack would react to a bet, we see that they fold around 46% of the time. Let’s see some more details:

• Anything better than top pair would never fold.
• Two pair and better would always raise — however, only Ace-Four and Four-Five are really in that category here.
• Underpairs (Kings through pocket Tens) would mostly fold.
• Second pairs (like Ten-Nine) would mostly call.

And everything worse than that would either fold or not be in the range very much. 

So if we assume an overfold for this player — which is what the average player on mid stakes is doing — then we can go ahead and increase this folding frequency a little bit. So let’s say instead of folding 46% of the time, they fold 51% of the time here. So, a little bit more often — which the data shows. 

The data shows an overfold of 10 percentage points overall, but we have to remember that this is for all Ace-high boards. So in this particular instance, I would think that going for 10% (which would mean 56% of the time) might be a little bit optimistic.

Here, nothing that is not top pair would ever call, except for a little bit of Ten-Nine. So let’s be a little more conservative and say that Queens would sometimes call, and Ten-Nine would also sometimes call. That already tells us the direction we want to go as the small blind.

Now we’ll lock all these hands and run the simulation again:

What we’ll see is that, for us as the small blind, we bet a lot more often. Before, it was around 52% bets. Now it’s at 68%. And especially the bluffing region increased:

• Everything that is the third pair bets almost all the time.
• King-high bets virtually every time.
• Even hands lower than that increase their bluffs a little bit.

Comparing that to the GTO frequency:

• Third pairs and worse would only bluff at 47%.
• In this exploitative approach, these hands bet more than 83% of the time.
• So, almost double the amount of bluffs that we can go for here.

And of those bluffs, King-Queen is a pure bluff here, which wouldn’t be the case in GTO. In GTO, this hand would be a mix. We also see that the EV of bluffing has increased drastically.

Here, of course, as it is a mixing hand, the EVs of betting and checking will be close. Now et’s take the hand we were looking at:  . In the standard GTO sim, it has an EV of 0.74 big blinds:

But when we expect the hijack to overfold, this number jumps to 3.9 big blinds. That’s more than three big blinds of additional profit — just with this exact combo, which is huge.

Let’s also look at which hands we don’t want to bluff. The only hands we don’t want to bluff here that are third pair or lower are:

•  .
•  .
•  .

And that’s for a reason. These hands block a lot of the hijack’s folding hands — like  ,  ,  . They also block the Jacks and Queens that have a spade, which would call the flop much more often and are a big part of the hijack’s folding region on the river.

If you want to find these golden lines, you need two things:

• To know they exist.
• To have the keys to unlock their value.

Another benefit of knowing the population's mistakes is that when you do get caught bluffing — which will still happen, around 50% of the time in this spot — you won’t second-guess yourself.  You’ll know you made the right play. And the long run is your friend.

Ready to Level Up?

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