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:
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.
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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.
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
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.