True but i think you can do better then assuming everyone raises the same size from every position

All our charts are very simple to use. No memorization required.

Simply yell the current action at your phone and it will tell you what to do. This may seem like cheating, but rest assured all solutions are precomputed and therefore constitute a "chart".

This is really dumb. Preflop ranges don't have to be perfect, they just have to be "good enough." Putting out other people's paid content, whether legal or illegal, is a ****ing scummy move when you have identical paid content that you're shilling. I bet any of these sites could take this guy's charts and shred them apart too.

If you google his name you'll see Alvin has caused some controversy in the poker community.

You know, thats what salesman do "seem to know their ****"...

I'll check it out

i guess they never looked at ev of those charts lol most of these chart diffrences are like 0.001-0.01 bb diffrence assuming u play perfect gto post flop lol, not to mention most tbls have a casual and some regulars playing weird ranges so u have to manualy adjust ur ranges anyway. such a stupid discussion. u just have people that payed thousands for hardware to run sims, they will go to grave now with how amazing their charts are.

Imagine using preflop charts. Virgin online grinders vs. Chad live pros

Full disclosure: I'm currently a moderator on the Zenith Discord, and have been paid by Thomas to create and maintain the Zenith Range Viewer.

I generally agree with the criticisms made in the video, although unfortunately there is a lack of explanation of many of them, and it definitely isn't particularly tactful (especially the statement regarding MMA's graph, which I have no reason to believe is faked).

Going to clarify a few misconceptions though:

The Monker solves for the Zenith ranges are either already available for free, or will be available for free at the end of this year. The viewer used in the video shows those same ranges, however does require a payment to view the ranges beyond the BU and SB opens at 100BB; but you can always use Monker Viewer for free instead. I believe this was also stated in the video.

I'm not going to comment on the actual legality of showing other people's ranges in the video since I'm not a lawyer. However from an ethical perspective, unless the video was structured such that it showed a substantial amount of the paid ranges, or provided links to pirated versions of that content, I don't have an issue with it. I'd consider it analogous to using clips from a movie when criticizing it.

Also when comparing the EV of two strategies (one simplified, one more complex), a common mistake is to look at the aggregate EV of the entire range for each player. Instead, the difference in EV needs to be calculated on a hand-by-hand basis, and aggregated from there. This is because in a simplified strategy, the EV for a given hand is calculated assuming that the other player is limited in their options; but in the complex strategy the EV will account for a wider variety of options being on the table.

This means that when a player using a more complex strategy encounters a player using a simplified one (assuming they play their strategies reasonably well), the EV of many hands in the complex player's range will increase beyond the numbers in the sim; whilst many hands in the simplified range will decrease in EV due to the opponent having new, unaccounted for actions.

Of course, as others have already said here, it is impractical to implement a 7-sizing strategy in game; however the purpose of these sims isn't to be emulated. Instead the intent is for the users to identify how ranges change with different sizes and different configurations; as well as to see which sizes are preferred by the solver in different spots (rarely more than 2-3, often just 1). This is why I built a trainer into the viewer so that people can get a feel for how to play a variety of spots, as opposed to trying to memorise ranges (which isn't a productive way to approach sims imo).

Happy to clarify further or respond to other questions (which are good faith/not already answered) over the next couple of days.

If i was the owner of the sites he displayed the charts from i would buy his and review it in the same manner. Cheaper than a lawyer.

well i watch a lot of live streams and considering how terribly most of the people play maybe they should invest in a few preflop charts

What a bunch of **** about the sizings, completely unnecessary and a waste of resources when running the sim. You should be trying to simplify your preflop strategy, not make it more complicated.

10 buckets per street shows he is clueless. If he didn't have 23 bet sizes per position, he could use more buckets, which would give you more accurate solutions.

My preflop sims have 10k buckets per street.

Your boss is a dick riding hater that puts out sub par products.

That was really hard to watch

The problem is that Thomas approach with monker solver is terrible.
For example if you give monker the option to raise to 2bb,25bb and 3bb Monker will obviously mix. Now assuming you used sufficient accuracy for later streets (which you didn't but let's assume you did this part correctly for a moment) your results would give the GTO response for a strategy based on 2bb 2,5bb and 3bb opens.

It doesn't give you the perfect response against opponents who choose 1 of those raise sizes in only.
The only way to get these is to solve size by size.
Ironically I believe poker detox (if i remember correctly) did this and Thomas berated them for it.

Also Thomas needs to start using more buckets postflop and bigger textures. And way less sizings post.
Also he needs more patience. I watched him lecture on a monker sim with 3 iterations yesterday.
Frankly you boss is selling garbage.

edit:
Also for the same reason your training mode is nonsense. The Data you get is massively flawed

I mean the guy does not understand why limping SB in a high rake env (even without having to do the math) does not seem to be a good idea and says you pay the same 5% rake if you limp or if you don't. That actually made me laugh

The irony of that typo was not lost on me😆

Its honestly impressive to spew this much nonsense with this level of confidence. What a clown.

I’m pretty doubtful that copyright would protect a range at all. Copyright protects literary and artistic works, and explicitly does -not- protect ideas. I didn’t watch much of the video in OP, but if someone were to simply describe the ranges presented in one of these charts, or reproduce that information in their own chart, I’d wager that would not violate copyright in any use context.

It is possible that the graphical representations of the ranges would be copyrightable (i.e. in artisitic expression represented by the actual images). But in this case, the artistic expression itself would have to be original and nonobvious. I.e. if the someone were to create a new way of visualizing ranges, that would likely be copyrightable. But I don’t think showing a bunch of standard 13x13 grid with a standard color scheme would be sufficiently original to merit protection. This is a little more subjective though and I’m not sure how similar a precedent exists.

This, These 1k courses are hot pieces of trash from the ones I have seen. Better off spending that 1k on a solver and hiring someone to help you with it.

This guy comes off as a huge tool bag. Pretty out of line to say MMA is faking his results just to try and boost his own stupid website.

I read this post 7x and legit can't understand what you are talking about, but we've got a tough choice here at a high level:

a) The part time academics/ champions of preflop poker charts are right about where the EV comes from in poker

b) MMASHERdog making millions of dollars a year actually playing highstakes games is right about where the EV comes from in poker


Everything I've seen from Zenith is quite embarrassing honestly, note that MMA or other highstakes players haven't made videos pointing out the very obvious flaws in your methodologies, they've just left you to it.

Sometimes better to do than talk.

Some dudes that have messed with solvers and played poker for 2 years think they're smarter than all of the people that have been doing this for 20 years, story checks out

Poker has changed so fast i don’t think time in the game is really relevant for strat content creation. The skills from 20 years ago don’t transfer. There are plenty of guys hanging around who haven’t kept up. This will be a “what have you done lately” industry for a while

*this isn’t an endorsement of Zenith or a criticism specific to any of the pros mentioned in the thread.

I'm sure the Zenith poker ranges are great, but unless you have 2 PCs and 10 monitors good luck using them.

20 yrs is an exageration bust most of the high stakers who won 10 yrs ago are still winning same now so ye solvers havent changed jack **** for them u still need to be smart and talented

this couldnt be further from the truth