Hi all,

I started concentrating on range balancing a few months ago. At first I was using a notebook. There was some noticeable improvement in my results, but I could tell that I needed to be presented with ideas out of my own conditioned thinking. I've got Piosolver now (basic) and it's opening up a new world.

However, I understand there is probably an efficient way to utilize this new information. For example, I read on Upswing Poker that it's best to use solvers for flop play and not to rely too much on the turn or river advice. The reason being that human beings are not perfectly balanced, and that tendency gets magnified on later streets. (So exploitative play is presumably better here.)

Is it worth looking at the hands Piosolver bluff-raises with on later streets anyway just to get idea what they are?

Also, as humans we can't use the varied frequencies per hand that Piosolver recommends. I'm assuming it is best to consolidate most hands into 100% frequency actions. There is probably some skill to doing this efficiently.

I'm curious how other people use Piosolver to review their hands. I've watched a few videos on Youtube, but thought I'd reach out here, too.

Thanks in advance.

im familiar w monker, so i cant speak for pio specifics, but, in general:

re "player tendencies by turn and river are so off solver becomes irrelevant."
- use node locking, you force input a range that your opponent is using, and force the solver to play with this (bad) range in this(bad) way, and then compare the change in the counter strategy to that of the original ranges counter strategy ie you've found the exploitative adjustment

as per frequencies, look for trends, apply the scientific method. if you notice it doing something at a high frequency, come up with a theory as to what/why its doing it, and then create similar/opposite situations to either confirm or refute your theory and repeat until you find the commonality. what you discover is the take away point to write in your harry potter notebook.

This is solid advice and probably the best you'll get from this thread, OP.

Great stuff. You've pointed me in a very useful direction. I like the scientific approach.

And I have all those empty notebooks. I have to fill them with something! (Batman, not Harry Potter)

Solvers becoming mainstream in BQ Questions sub forum how interesting... this is the wrong sub forum OP but there are a lot of guides on yt

The problem with modeling optimal play against extremely non-optimal ranges isn’t that it’s more difficult. It’s just not worth the time and effort.

It would be a different situation if a significant percentage of bad players would play the same way. Then you could solve for a “good” and a “bad” range. On the flop, that’s still somewhat the case, you can solve against the group of players that’s tight-passive pre and overfolds the flop, the group that’s tight-passive and underfolds the flop, the group that’s loose-passive and underfolds and the group that’s loose-passive and overfolds. That already covers a lot of players.

But if you go to the turn and then start with ‘loose-passive pre, underfolds flop, overfolds turn’ you end up with an absurd amount of work for relatively small groups of players.

Yeah, it's sad people feel the need to ask this here, it's either off topic or poker (or, more accurately, NLHE) is dead

this isnt 1970 any more, guys. school age kids have access to info and software thats been flooding across the border from eastern europe 10x more potent than the stuff you and your friends used, and it doesnt take long to move on to harder things like gto trainers and solvers

Yes I am a low-stakes player. My interest in using a solver is mainly to broaden/improve my raising ranges. I am sure I could have done it by grinding 1 million hands but I see no problem with taking a short cut.