

You might be thinking it’s great someone has developed a software that understands poker, but why should one care about solvers anyway since you’re playing against humans? At a table where everyone is playing their hands close to a GTO poker strategy, only the house will win in the long-run. The same goes for Small Blind versus UTG, since Small Blind has to put dead money in before the flop, but you can still calculate what you from the Small Blind with different hands when UTG opens to lose the minimum. Yet, t here are still factors in play that solvers can’t overcome, like range advantage and position – it’s impossible to develop a strategy for the Cut-off position that would break-even against Button due to the positional disadvantage.

There’s ton of content available on how to run sims with solvers. Once you put in some basic variables such as preflop hand ranges and available bet sizes, solvers generate strategies for those situations that are impossible to exploit. You’ll also get familiar with the terms used around solver applications! Dont worry – o nce you study many spots over and over, you can start to predict how certain spots are played by the solver. If you haven’t ever studied poker strategies with GTO solvers, some plays suggested by them might seem a bit unorthodox at first. The solutions provided by solvers are very close to the game theory optimal (GTO) play, which means that a player using these GTO solutions can’t be exploited by other players. Some years ago it was unimaginable to be able to run such a powerful piece of software on your home computer – with the computing power of modern PCs, this is no longer the case. Simply put, solvers are computer programs that calculate solutions to any poker situations.
