Poker solvers for dummies: part 1 (the basics)
What are solvers used for? How do they work? Should you even bother if you play low / mid stakes?
Part 1: Poker solver basics (you are here)
Part 2: Types of solvers
Part 3: The easiest solvers
Part 4: Adjusting to opponents
Part 5: Post flop and ICM
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Poker solvers are applications that provide the optimal play for (most) poker scenarios. There are several kinds of solvers (we’ll cover the popular ones in the next newsletter), and they all serve specific purposes.
For now, we’ll break down how solvers work in general, and how you should use them if you play low / mid stakes tournaments.
Solvers run hand simulations over and over again, and give you the expected result after hundreds or thousands of simulation “runs”. So as an example, if you raised in early position with AhKd, got called by the small blind, and then were faced with a decision on a flop of QhTh3s, a solver would run this scenario thousands of times, and score each potential option from best to worst, with the best option obviously considered to be the optimal play.
However, the solver assumes that your opponents are also playing optimally. What does this mean? When your AK hand is being run through simulations, the options are being scored on how successful each option is against your opponent’s play. But your opponent’s play, according to the simulations, will be optimal. This means they choose the correct hand ranges preflop, and act correctly on every street after the flop, including bet sizing. And as we know, most players do not play optimally. So solver outputs can be flawed. At the low / mid stakes player pools, players are playing far, far from optimally, to the point where many are simply unpredictable.
So does this make solvers useless for low / mid stakes players? The emphatic answer is NO. Solvers are incredibly useful for making you better at poker. Let’s get into why…
The biggest part of your game that you can work on is your preflop ranges. If every amateur player got good at playing preflop ranges, poker would literally die. That is how important preflop range selection is. So many hands that go sideways postflop could have been completely avoided if you had just folded preflop. Some of these hands can be the difference between final tabling a tournament instead of not cashing at all.
First, an excellent, easy to use solver to get started with is GTO Wizard. Get 10% off with my link: Get GTO Wizard now!
For example, if you have 40bb (big blinds) in the HJ (hijack) position, what range of hands should you play?
Note: if you are not familiar with position abbreviations, just check the appendix at the bottom of the article!
Did you know you should fold 22, K9o, and T9o? Did you know you should raise Q7s, and K4s? These details are critically important to your preflop decision making, and so much of your winnings will be dependent on the strength of the hands you choose to take with you into postflop play.
What should you do if you are faced with a 3bet from the button after raising from UTG, at 30bb?
Did you know you should fold AJo and KQo half the time? A9s most of the time? Jam 55 some of the time? You can also see how many scenarios there are. 40bb, 60bb, and 100bb for this same situation, all with different ranges. Or you are MP and opponent is BB. Or what ranges you should be 3betting vs flatting vs folding, at all different stack sizes. You can spend a tremendous amount of time studying preflop ranges, and still have many spots you’re not sure of after a year.
But getting lost in this tidal wave of information can be overwhelming and make you not want to get started at all. Trying to memorize this like your multiplication tables in school can also seem pretty lame.
The best way to use solvers is to have some questions you want to ask. Often, you may not even know that you have a question in the first place. Have you ever wondered, if an early position player raised, a middle position player reraised, and you have 100bb in the small blind with 88, what should you do? Taken further, what is the bottom hand that you should call with? What about bottom hand you should raise with?
Bringing questions like this with you, along with high curiosity to learn more spots, will make solvers more useful for you. It is also my belief that people learn better practically. That is, real world situations are the most effective learning tools, vs burying yourself in theory. So take more notes when you are playing (you can even do voice memos on your phone). It doesn’t even need to be a huge hand, just any hand where you didn’t feel pretty sure you got it right. Like if you raised the button with K9o with 40bb and got 3bet by the small blind and you folded, was that correct? Or you played this same spot with A3o, and decided to go all in and your opponent folded. But was jamming with A3o actually correct, even though it worked this time?
Here are other example questions to ask:
What’s the bottom hand I can raise between HJ vs button at 40bb deep?
What should I do with A7o in the SB vs a CO raise at 100bb deep?
What should I do with JJ UTG+1 vs a UTG raise at 60bb deep?
What should I do with KJo from the HJ if I get 3bet by the SB at 30bb deep?
And you can obviously come up with many of your own, while keeping track of many more spots while you’re actually playing.
The more you think about preflop ranges, ask a lot of questions, and check a solver to see if you got it right, the faster you will improve your game. But remember, never use solvers to help you make a decision during a hand, live or online. This is literally cheating. It’s perfectly fine to check a solver after you have finished a hand though, to see if you got it right. Doing it as soon as I’m done with a hand personally helps me remember the spot better because it’s fresh in my mind, and I think it would help others too.
So just using solvers simply to help you preflop is certainly worth the investment, even if you’re grinding the chaotic low / mid stakes streets.
Up next: The different kinds of solvers
Coming soon: adjusting for opponent’s ranges, postflop play, and ICM
Reminder, get 10% off GTO Wizard with my link: Get GTO Wizard now!
Appendix:
For those not familiar with hand position abbreviations, below is a list, in order from first to act, to last to act preflop:
UTG: under the gun (first to act preflop)
MP: middle position
HJ: hijack
CO: cutoff
BTN: button
SB: small blind
BB: big blind
You will sometimes see “LP” (late position) used to represent CO and BTN. MP usually includes positions between UTG and CO. More rare, but sometimes people use LJ (low jack) to represent position before HJ.
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Cool article. Looking forward to future ones! Most people make solvers sound so damn complicated. Thinking of it as a tool to answer a question makes it a lot more accessible so I like your thinking. If you just approach a solver with no direction, it's too overwhelming on where to even begin.