8 Tips to Get Max Value from the Lucid GTO Trainer

There are countless ways to use GTO trainers like Lucid GTO to improve your poker skills.

Upswing Poker founder Doug Polk recently joined Upswing VP Mike Brady to discuss eight tips to help players get maximum value from the Lucid GTO Trainer tool, available now from Upswing Poker.

Let’s dive into the eight tips Doug and Mike shared on Upswing’s YouTube channel:

Tip #1: Play the Leaderboard to Practice Random Situations

Real poker is unpredictable. You never know exactly what type of situation will come up in a session. The leaderboard is meant to simulate the randomness of actually playing poker.

Plus, you get to see how your skills compare to everyone else that’s using the Lucid GTO trainer.

“What I really like about this approach is that it gives you essentially a random situation to look at,” says Polk. “Sometimes we know exactly where we’re leaking in poker, particularly if we have larger samples and we can hone in on it.”

“But sometimes we don’t, especially if we’re a live poker player, or we have a small sample size, or whatever the case may be. So (the Leaderboard) lets us look at some different situations where we get to kind of ask ourselves what we think we should do, and compare in an individual spot. And it might give us a nice starting point for some training that we might not have even known that we need to do.”

You can play multiple tables at the same time with the Leaderboard tool, allowing you to truly simulate the feel of multi-tabling online poker.

Tip #2: Set Up Custom Drills to Hone in on Specific Situations

If you feel like a particular part of your game is weak, you can use the Custom Drill feature to practice a specific situation over and over again.

For example, let’s say you’re super confident when playing in position as the preflop raiser, but you’re less confident playing out of position (let’s say as the CO opener facing a BTN call in a single-raised pot).

You can set up a custom drill to practice that exact spot. You can drill for the first decision, for one street, or for the entire hand through all streets.

If you set up a drill for the first decision in a CO vs. BTN SRP spot, you’ll see a flop, and decide whether you want to check or bet. Once you make that decision, you’ll move on to the next hand.

“I would actually suggest for doing custom drills generally, go with one street or first decision,” Brady says. “For me that’s kind of the point of doing a custom drill, to really hone in on that one situation you want to practice.”

You can filter the Custom Drills for specific flops, allowing you to drill specific situations like jack-high flops, connected flops, monotone flops, etc.

Tip #3: Use the Replayer

You can pull up the Replayer while drilling to see what the entire strategy looks like in a given situation. 

Let’s say you’re drilling for a BTN vs. BB SRP situation. You have A♦7♦ on the BTN, the flop comes K♦Q♣2♣ , and you choose between betting small, betting big, or checking.

Once you’ve made your decision, the drill moves on to the next hand. You can pull up any previous hand in the Replayer, and see the Lucid GTO strategy for any hand in the BTN opening range on that K♦Q♣2♣ board.

Check out the strategy for that board on the right side of the screen below:

 

Tip#4: Discover Bet Sizing Heuristics

The solver work for Lucid GTO includes multiple bet sizes for every situation. On a lot of boards, the solver is going to choose to mix between multiple bet sizes.

We don’t recommend trying to memorize and copy these complex multi-size strategies. It’s way too hard for a human to do that effectively. Instead, you should look for trends in which bet size is preferred in a given situation. Note the general shape of the strategies as you go.

If you make a habit of doing this, you’ll start to internalize heuristics that you can call upon in-game.

Tip #4 segues nicely into Tip #5:

Tip #5: Use the Sim Browser to Click Through the Game Tree

With Lucid GTO, the equilibrium poker strategy is at your fingertips. With the Sim Browser tool, you can click through the entire game, and see how each player is supposed to respond to every action in every situation.

For example, let’s take a look at a CO vs, BB SRP spot, where the flop comes A♦K♦2♣. The BB checks, and the CO strategy looks like this:

The Lucid GTO sim gives the CO the option to Bet 1.5, Bet 3.5, Bet 6.65, or check (pot is 5). With a significant nut advantage on this board, Lucid prefers to either overbet (Bet 6.65) or check. Lucid bets 41% of the time with this size, and checks 59% of the time. It never uses either of the other two sizes.

You can click on any of the bet sizes, or the check for the CO, and see how the BB responds to that choice. 

Let’s see what happens when we change the board to 7♦6♦5♣:

This seven-high board changes the strategy drastically for both the BB and the CO. The BB, which checks 100% of the time on the A♦K♦2♣ board, now leads 36% of the time. 

If we make the BB check, the CO never uses the Bet 6.65 size, as this board heavily favors the BB. The CO should mix between the two smaller bet sizes, while checking about half the time. You can click on the Bet 1.5 and Bet 3.5 tabs to see the specific ranges for each of those sizes.

You can compare countless boards and countless situations within the Sim Browser. If you want to make it even easier to compare two strategies and/or two different spots, consider our next tip:

Tip #6: Open Multiple Windows

Click the icon at the top left of the Sim Browser screen to open up another browser in a separate window. For instance, you could open the A♦K♦2♣ sim and the 7♦6♦5♣ sim in separate windows, making it much easier to compare the two spots.

You could also run two separate sims on just the 7♦6♦5♣ spot, comparing LJ vs BB to CO vs. BB. 

“As the preflop ranges get more specific, there are going to be textures that are just way better or way worse for them,” Polk says. “So you certainly want to think about those preflop ranges. It’s nice to be able to pull them up side by side and see some of the differences in that preflop construction, and then the way that gets executed in terms of strategy.”

You can also compare strategies for 100BB stacks and 200BB stacks with the multiple windows feature in the Sim Browser.

Tip #7: Use the Hand Class Breakdowns

The hand class breakdown feature is arguably one of the most helpful features in Lucid GTO. This feature helps you understand exactly how top pair, or sets, or overpairs, or draws play on a specific board.

Let’s look at a BTN vs. BB SRP example, using a J♦7♣2♣ board. We’ll hone in on the BB check-raising strategy vs. a BTN c-bet. Take a look at the top right of the screen below:

Lucid GTO gives the BB the option to call, Raise 4.82, or Raise 8.36 vs. a BTN c-bet of Bet 1.5. You can see how each hand class (set, two pair, top pair, etc.) selects among those three options.

You can click on any of the hand classes to drill down on the specific range and strategy for that hand class. You can use the hand class feature for any sim and any part of the game tree.

Tip #8: Drill Unintuitive Strategies

If you discover an unintuitive strategy inside the Sim Browser, create a Custom Drill for that spot and practice it!

Click the “Create drill from here” button at the bottom right of the Sim Browser to convert whatever spot you’re looking at into a Custom Drill.

Let’s say you’re investigating that BB check-raise strategy we’ve discussed on the J♦7♣2♣ board. Click that button on the bottom right, and you’ll immediately go into the Custom Drill setup for that spot.

Lucid GTO Trainer Available Now From Upswing Poker

Lucid GTO is available right now! Click here to get in on the most comprehensive interactive poker trainer ever made, for only $49/month.