Poker Solvers have revolutionised the way that top professionals approach the game. By showing a way to reliably study optimal poker, they’ve revealed new strategies and ways of thinking about the game that have made today’s elite players stronger than ever.
However, solvers are not only for high-stakes pros. All semi-serious players in poker today should understand solvers and incorporate them into their own study routine. This guide will explain how poker solvers work, how to use them, and how to incorporate them into your own poker study.
What is a Poker Solver?
Poker Solvers are software designed to help players improve their poker game by looking at theoretically optimal strategies. In contrast to simple poker strategies that players learn as beginners, poker solvers construct mathematically-proven, advanced strategies for every situation.
A Poker Solver produces advanced strategies by playing billions of hands against itself until it comes up with an unbeatable strategy. Thanks to Nash Equilibrium, this strategy cannot be defeated by any other strategy, and the further players deviate away from it, the more they will lose against it. The best players can do is to break even by replicating it.
How do Poker Solvers Work?
Whenever players want to solve a poker hand, they will put the situation into a solver and run a simulation. Once the solver has finished working, it will produce a complete strategy showing what the optimal line is for every possible hand either player could have.
Players can study these lines to attempt to remember them by memory, or discover patterns between similar hands and boards. Overall, players will try to imitate the solver to play the theoretically best they can.
What is GTO in Poker?
GTO stands for Game Theory Optimal, and is a strategy in poker which aims to be undefeatable. By making the opponent indifferent to making decisions in each situation, no strategy can make money against GTO. In addition, the further away players deviate from GTO, the more they will lose.
GTO is often contrasted with exploitative strategies. For example, players employing exploitative poker may fold 100% of their bluff-catchers on a river, on the basis their opponent is unlikely to be bluffing enough.
Properly employed, exploitative poker will make more money as it takes advantage of the mistakes of opponents. However, if it is misapplied – for example, a player assumes an opponent will bluff too much and calls down too wide, but the opponent is actually underbluffing – then it can be a big losing strategy.
Overall, since most players play far from Poker GTO solver strategies, it is best to use them as a starting point, and deviate from it to adjust to player tendencies. This will certainly be the case for live poker, but is also true even in the best online cardrooms, where our reviews found that many fields were frequently full of weak players.
Poker Solvers: Advantages and Disadvantages
While poker solvers are an extremely useful tool for learning how to play better poker, they are not without their drawbacks. Here are the main pros and cons of using solvers, versus using traditional exploitative poker strategies.
Have a Proven Winning Strategy
By far the main advantage of studying poker using a solver is having an unbeatable strategy. By adopting the solver lines, no player can ever exploit or take advantage of you. If you can execute the strategy well, you would be a winning player in any game you took part in.
Prepare for Tougher Games
While exploiting weaker players can win more money in the short term, these tactics will stop working once you move up to higher stakes. As a result, it may be better to adopt a more solver-based approach which will be effective against any level of player, rather than a short-term strategy which only works against poor players.
Instant Feedback
One advantage of conforming to a GTO style of poker is being able to quickly look up plays from your sessions and determine how close you were to the optimal result. For exploitative play, you may never know if a play that you made was the correct one – your assumptions about the player may have been wrong, so it can become difficult to iron out your mistakes. With solvers, you can immediately look up your hand and see if your strategy was a winning one or not.
Exploits Make More Money
While a perfect Poker GTO solver strategy will win against any opponent, it may not win the most money. Poker players have myriad weaknesses in their game, and most pools tend to have lots of players making the same errors.
Even if you don’t know your specific opponent, there are many strategies you can employ to exploit the field in general. In fact, the way most stables instruct their students to play at lower stakes online now is by adopting purely exploitative strategies. These may not work against elite players, but they certainly make more money at the stakes where the vast majority of players actually play.
However, solvers can also be useful even for exploitative players. By knowing the optimal frequencies, players can far better know how much to deviate, and find out where opponents are likely to be imbalanced.
The Cost of Solvers
Free poker solvers don’t exist on the market – you’ll need to pay up a few hundred dollars for the best ones. Even once you’ve bought it, you’ll still need to actually run it. And that takes not only time, but also a lot of processing power. You’ll need a powerful computer and plenty of energy to be able to come up with a strong solution for most situations.
Solver Limitations
While solvers can also be used to study exploitative strategies, there are still limitations. Some fields of poker, such as multiway pots, and postflop pots under ICM pressure, are very under-studied and are not available on many solvers at present.
However, solvers are constantly updated and come with new features as they improve – so these areas of the game are likely to become better explored by solvers in the near future.
How to use Poker Solvers
Keep it Simple
Poker has been much harder for computers to solve compared to games like chess because the game tree is so large. You can also learn a lot easier if you keep it as small as possible – don’t have four bet sizes for every situation, which can increase the number of situations exponentially. Instead, just have one bet size per flop, only expanding into different sizes on later streets.
Remember Your Range
Remember that solvers teach you how to play your entire range, not your hand. If you look up a hand in a solver and it tells you that you played it well, that is almost irrelevant. What matters is the whole strategy with all possible hands you could have – and if that’s lacking, then you have a leak to fix.
Consider Exploits
Don’t simply go along with every action the solver tells you to take. You may find a situation where you have to call down very light with many hands, for example. However, if you look at the solution for the opponent, you may find multiple unrealistic bluffs which players in your games are highly unlikely to find. If that’s the case, you should ignore the solver, and fold your weakest hands.
Conversely, if the solver must call down light with many weak hands, you may also discern that from the perspective of the other player, this is an excellent spot to bluff, and you can include many more bluffs than the solver suggests.
What are the Best Poker Solvers?
PIOSolver is the most popular solver in the market today, although many alternatives also exist, notably MonkerSolver and GTO+.
PIOSolver is generally considered to be the best point for pricing and features, although very advanced players may prefer the extra features of MonkerSolver, such as preflop solutions.
Finally, GTO+ is an excellent budget option for lower-stakes players. While it lacks some advanced features, it is an inexpensive program which can solve postflop situations just as well as the pricier alternatives.
Poker Solvers vs Poker Trainers
As well as true poker solvers, there are also other products on the market which offer libraries of solutions. Rather than run a simulation with your own computer, you can instead access a pre-solved array of solutions for many different spots.
The advantages to this are that you can access these poker solver apps without a powerful computer, and that you can browse through them quickly rather than waiting hours for each solve. In addition, professional players and solvers have created the solutions, so you won’t make the mistake of misusing parameters in the solver which might lead you to make mistakes.
The two main options on the market right now are DTO, founded by renowned pro Dominik Nitzsche, and GTOWizard. They both offer various subscription tiers for both cash games, tournaments, and even other formats such as Spin & Gos.
However, these are only available on a subscription basis, rather than as a one-off purchase. The cost can quickly ramp up, with the overall price being more than buying a solver outright after just a few months.