> going to be taken for a ride by other bots

So.. bots are a thing? :)

What I'm trying to say is this: if being close to GTO is better than humans, your bot doesn't need to always play perfectly to not be detected. And if you say there's no GTO yet that means there's no standard yet.

To re-visit the chess analogy, in chess they compare each player's moves against top engines and come up with a score. Either centipawn loss or whatever else they do (chessdotcom doesn't comment on their measures, understandably so). What tools would a poker TO employ? Are there even such tools? And would your own bot even resemble that?

I'm still not convinced this is as easy as you said...

edit:

> It would also be super stupid as a human to try and play only GTO if you knowy ou play against other humans. While GTO guarantees that you - on average - don't lose it is by FAR inferior to looking for exploitative spots. Trying to play GTO-ish is the baseline you go back to when you don't know what to do - not the default strat as a player

Well ...

> Pluribus, a new AI bot we developed in collaboration with Carnegie Mellon University, has overcome this challenge and defeated elite human professional players in the most popular and widely played poker format in the world: six-player no-limit Texas Hold'em poker. Pluribus defeated pro players in both a “five AIs + one human player” format and a “one AI + five human players” format. If each chip was worth a dollar, Pluribus would have won an average of about $5 per hand and would have made about $1,000/hour playing against five human players. These results are considered a decisive margin of victory by poker professionals.

I don't have a quote handy, but I remember listening to a podcast with the creator of pluribus, and they didn't specifically code an "exploitative" strategy, AFAIK. Whatever their bot did, seemed to work tho... So not that stupid? :)