Here's a story of how I created the world’s first No-Limit Holdem poker solver and made $500k by age 23

I had to keep details secret since 2013, but now you can read how I went from near broke mid-stakes player to making business with Kanu, Trueteller and RaulGonzalez.

Short version below. Full version here

My journey began in 2008 when I discovered online poker. I instantly recognized the opportunity and in just 18 months, I progressed from microstakes to regularly playing up to $1000 buy-in games, won $40k, and moved out of my parents' house



What really bothered me though was that I had to grind poker every day.

In one-on-one poker, there's an unbeatable strategy called the Nash Equilibrium. As a math student, proving its existence in poker was easy, but actually calculating it was another matter

Eventually I succeeded!

In January 2013, following months of experimentation and research, I finally developed the program. It approximated the Nash Equilibrium for No-Limit Hold'em from the flop with two active players, assuming a limited amount of bet sizes.



The program started with a random strategy and improved with each iteration as it played against itself, and increased the frequency of more profitable actions, relying on the Monte-Carlo Counterfactual Regret Minimization algorithm

I aimed to sell my software for $50,000 per person to elite players in high-stakes games. These top players couldn't hire coaches because anyone better than them was also a competitor at the tables, making my software a unique learning tool in their arsenal.

Despite being able to verify the optimality of calculated strategies programmatically, I still faced skepticism from potential customers. The significance of the breakthrough led some to outright dismiss my demo offers, suspecting a scam.

Ultimately, it was a specific unconventional move that convinced my first and most important customer, Trueteller



Back in 2012, consensus poker wisdom dictated always checking the turn after a check-call on the flop. Yet, the solver suggested a 11% bet here
recognized that such a unique move could only be produced by a genuine solver, not a set of hardcoded rules or simple heuristics

I also reached out to Alex Millar through a DM here on the twoplustwoforum. He and his group of friends expressed significant interest, noticing solver's deep understanding of blocker cards and a precise balance between bluffs and strong hands

Over several weeks, we negotiated a $200,000 deal. By the end of it, I had only $6,000 left in my account, as I've poured everything I had into developing the software. I was determined not to rush the negotiations, understanding that haste could result in accepting a lower offer

Later that year, I created an Omaha solver, which I eventually sold for $300k, bringing my total earnings for the year to $500k. This was six times more than what I had earned as a poker player the previous year, marking a significant leap in my career and financial well-being.

You can read the full story here:

https://medium.com/@olegostroumov/wo...r-6b1dbe80d0ee

And play a solver demo here: https://holdem.olegsolvers.com/

Twitter where I'm going to post more stories: https://twitter.com/OlegOstroumov




https://twitter.com/Kanupoker/status...957444713?s=20



https://twitter.com/TTimofey_K/statu...15251369623979

Happy to answer your questions.

–Oleg

yea, thanks a lot

Good story. Not sure why you didn't use and work with the tool yourself more in poker when you were in dire straits financially, I mean you explained that you were more interested in coding and stuff, I understand that, but it would have been preferable to traversing near being busto I guess.

Who was using it in 2013?


Primo?

so you used a preexisting algorithm that has inherent issues dealing with real world complexities?

It was from you that OtB Red Baron got the solver "before" everyone else?

Nice story bro. Respect

Was OTB playing lots of HUSNGs?

He won some HU MTTs.

Edit: HUSNGs i don't know, tried to find something here. Nothing.

What are you working on now?

Oh, so you are responsible for messing up poker.

Interesting some top players had it before anyone else.

didn't Oskari Tammelin have a working solver in like 2008?

Is this the solver in Kanu's Upswing series?

kind of disappointing that some top players were top players only because they had access to this before everyone else though, didn’t have anything to do with talent in the end

Yeah but if it wasn’t him, someone else would have. I’m sure there were several dozen others working on something similar.

What stopped you from going public with the solver (like Punter did)? was it a need for the quick influx of cash contracting with HS pros provided?

Always cool to see some in depth stories about the evolution of poker.

Love him or hate him, Doug Polk was beating these guys by actually reasoning about the game in a human way. It always seemed so strange to me. All these people trying to figure out how to beat the game and it wasn't a hedge fund guy or math phd or computer science wiz but ****ing doug? An extroverted dudebro shitposter from 2p2... lol what a world.

Thanks for ruining poker, glad you made 500k though which is like 62000 big macs at this point

them reading this thread like

People realize if it wasn't OP creating it or TT/Kanu/etc. buying it it just would've another group of developers/players a year or two later, yeah?

Both the players named (Kanu and Trueteller) were already crushing though.

Probably more money in selling it to a few top players than in selling a software product publicly. Interesting people were using this in 2014. Therefore, it was probably influencing how other players played, even if they hadn't used the software.

OP should probably be in the poker HOF, but that isn't likely to happen.

I imagine people who write stuff like this as people who coasted on a mediocre level of natural talent 15 years ago, and then are bitter after failing when the game changed such that you actually have to put in work and be curious about poker strategy development to succeed, they interpret that as "ruining the game"

The game is way better now than it was 15 years ago, all the charlatans can be easily called out where as before it was hard to tell.

I was mostly joking, hence the cheeseburger reference. One thing poker will never have a shortage of is people who either don't get jokes or don't laugh at jokes.