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The poker RTA glossary: 40 terms, each in a sentence or two
Real-time assistance sits where game theory, computer vision and statistics meet, and each brings its own vocabulary. This is the list we wish every new user had read: the terms as they are used in solver output, in RTA product pages and in GTO MAX AI's own panels.
1. The tools
RTA (real-time assistance): software or any outside aid that helps you decide while a hand is live. Advises; you act. HUD (heads-up display): statistics about opponents shown on the table, from hand-history files; shows what they did, recommends nothing. Bot: software that reads the table and acts on its own. Solver: a program that computes the equilibrium strategy for a defined game. Pixel reader: software that turns the screen's pixels into a hand state without touching the client. OCR: optical character recognition, reading printed numbers and names from an image. Glyph: one printed symbol, a rank, a suit or a digit, as the reader learns it. Template: a stored example of a glyph the reader matches new pixels against. Vision model: an AI model that reads an image; slow and expensive, used in a good RTA only for glyphs nobody has taught it. Table map: the saved positions of everything on a particular client's table.
2. Game theory
GTO (game-theory optimal): the equilibrium strategy; the one that cannot be exploited. Nash equilibrium: a pair of strategies where neither player gains by changing alone. Exploitability: how much a perfect opponent could win against a strategy, usually as a share of the pot; a solver stops when it is small enough. CFR / CFR+: counterfactual regret minimisation, the algorithm solvers iterate to reach equilibrium. Tree: every sequence of actions the solver considers, with the bet sizes it allows at each point. Node: one decision point in the tree. Chance node: a card being dealt. Range: all the hands a player can hold at a node, each with a weight. Frequency: how often a strategy takes an action with a given hand; "bet 60%" means that hand bets six times in ten. Mixed strategy: a hand that takes more than one action at non-zero frequency. Indifference: the point at which two actions have equal value, which is where the equilibrium places its mixing. Range advantage: which player's range has more equity on a board. Nut advantage: which player's range has more of the strongest hands. Polarised: a range of very strong hands and bluffs with nothing in between. Condensed / merged: a range of medium-strength hands.
3. The arithmetic
Equity: your share of the pot if all cards were dealt out now. Pot odds: the price to call, b / (p + 2b) of equity needed against a bet of b into p. Alpha: the fold frequency a bluff needs to break even, b / (p + b). MDF (minimum defence frequency): how often you must continue so the bettor's bluffs do not profit, 1 minus alpha. SPR (stack-to-pot ratio): effective stack divided by the pot at the start of a street; low SPR commits you, high SPR gives room. Effective stack: the smaller of the two stacks in a heads-up pot. Blockers: cards in your hand that remove combinations from the opponent's range. Combos: the number of ways a hand can be made (six for a pocket pair, twelve for an offsuit hand, four suited). Push/fold: the short-stack regime where the only decisions are all-in or fold, usually under 15 big blinds.
4. Opponent modelling
Tendency: one measurable habit (fold to continuation bet, bluff frequency at showdown). Prior: what a tendency is assumed to be before any hands are seen, usually the population average. Posterior: the estimate after the observed hands, with its uncertainty. Beta-Binomial: the standard way to update a frequency from counts of yes and no; the maths behind "71% over 18 hands". Sample / confidence: how many observations stand behind a number and how much it is trusted. Archetype: a player type that fills in unobserved tendencies: TAG (tight-aggressive), LAG (loose-aggressive), nit, calling station, maniac. Exploit line: the equilibrium strategy moved towards the opponent's weaknesses, sized by distance from indifference and by sample. Damping: shrinking a deviation when the sample is small.
5. Around the table
Street: preflop, flop, turn, river. SRP / 3BP: single-raised pot, three-bet pot. C-bet: continuation bet by the preflop aggressor. Donk bet: a bet into the previous street's aggressor. Overbet: a bet larger than the pot. Multiway: three or more players in the pot postflop; outside what a two-player solver covers. Showdown: cards turned over at the end; where the reader learns what an opponent held.
The full picture of how these fit together: the poker RTA guide.
GTO MAX AI: the RTA that knows the player.
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More from the blog
- Is poker RTA detectable? How sites catch it in 2026
- GTO vs exploitative poker: when to leave the equilibrium, and by how much
- AI in poker: what RTA, bots and solvers actually do, and what they do not
- Playing GTO with real-time assistance: where the edge is, and where it is not
Longer reads: the poker RTA guide and all guides.