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by Maxatar 482 days ago
Your claim that a symmetric two player game always results in a draw is what I was replying to. That is only true for a strictly determined game.

As far as chess is concerned, it's unknown what perfect play yields, but if a round of chess consists of playing white once and playing black once, then a perfect game of chess is guaranteed to do no worse than a draw as you say.

The term GTO is used exclusively for poker, you won't find that term used for any other game, gambling or otherwise. I can see how the mixing of games and terminology could result in me misinterpreting what you meant though.

>In heads up poker, GTO is worst case zero EV. Obviously this does not mean that the worst case in a single hand is a $0 payout - that is a fairly absurd straw man.

The strawman is thinking that if EV is zero or even positive, then you only need to worry about a single hand or even a few hands.

On the contrary EV can positive or even infinite and yet you can still be guaranteed to lose in the long run due to variance:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_criterion

1 comments

Agree with you - sounds like we are on the same page and only confusion is on semantics. With nondeterministic games like poker, the draw guarantee only makes sense in the context of a sufficiently large number of hands. There are no guarantees on a single hand regardless of skill difference. Chess and other deterministic games essentially reach the "infinite hands" condition in a single game because there is no randomness, so the nonnegative EV is realized immediately.