You’ve played higher or lower?

Yeah they aren't easy to use at all. Not for the lazy. And if computers are hard for you, good luck.

Lower. I don't play that much NLHE anyway but it's all 3-5 and below.

Me either. DNegs talks about switching GTO gears a lot on his vlogs. Like, when he plays the killers, he uses all the GTO strat, but when he’s in bigger fields it doesn’t really come into play. If that’s true, then how practical is a solver for a 3/5 NL cash player or mid stakes tourney reg?

If you've spent more than 2 minutes wondering on the topic - it's practical for you.

Asking any more questions instead of doing is being lazy imo. I did a year of that. Regret. Get goin.

Also, if you want to get a small sense of the technical side required just download the free turn/river piosolver and play around with it.

I don’t play live NL cash games, but I do play NL tournaments. I spend most of my time playing LHE cash and mix games... so if the solvers are strictly NL that lessens the appeal for me. I feel like I’m a great LHE player but I wouldn’t mind spending time with a solver.

pio and monker work for limit holdem. monker works for limit o8 as well but the memory requirements are absurd.

i'm a little late to reply to this... i ended up playing this (didnt even see this post!) and was actually disappointed.

i visited HG in october and loved everything about their cashgame room and i can totally see why they are gunning for commerce. seats comfy, good food, phone chargers everywhere, good dealers, good layout, good mixgames.

this tournament however was mediocre, which is a small hiccup in the scheme of things but i need to point these out in case anyone with power is reading.

-90% of the dealers were unfamiliar with mix.

- the structure was a kessler-approved nightmare (way too deep for 4-5 hours then suddenly a giant crapshoot). this results in a lot of sharp regs max-late registering (good or bad depending on your point of view)

- they removed deuce and replaced it with PL Big O (i can imagine why this happened but i'm still disappointed).

- starting stacks were 30k and someone was given 35k (one extra big chip). fortunately that player is an upstanding dude (fuhs) and spoke out.

- how they handled the late entries was probably incorrect based on table talk, but i'll leave that to smarter people than me cuz i dont know how to run a 7 table tournament.

- when the tournament just started (we're talking like 7 players regged at this point), a player asked the presiding TD how long they thought the tournament would last. the TD quoted 6-8 hours. it ended up going 15 hours. this is a major **** up imo, cuz i actually ended up needing to fly out the next day due to family stuff and had a legit reason to consider just not registering. hearing the 6-8 hours quoted and then seeing it ended at 4AM makes me a little upset.

- iirc breaks were all 15 minutes and there was no dinner break and the line for sandwiches was too long. shoulda had more folding monies on me for dim sum.

anyways i just saw a lot of sloppy stuff from this tournament and would likely not support another one at this buyin level unless they changed the structure or the registration. i dont think anyone even had the opportunity to re-enter cuz it was so stupidly slow to start.

if we could just make it so limit/mix tournament start with like 25ish bets and go from there, that'd be great. its not the end of the world to register a limit tournament and bust the first hour. thats what tournaments are for. stop making it so i have to survive 5 hours! thats how u end at 4am. crikey.

ok endrant thx

The part about GTO / switching gears makes intuitive sense. My guess is a solver isn't very valuable for a game where people have very prominent lack of balance in many spots.

DISCLAIMER: That is only my guess. It is very possible solvers have features for helping you destroy unbalanced opponents that are just way over my head so I can't see the value. But recall that if your opponent in rock paper scissors makes a small deviation, even to 34 - 33 - 33, and never remembers your play, then your correct line is 0-100-0. Poker has spots like that too. If they're not bluffing the river enough, you should always fold. Theoretically live 2-5 or 3-5 must be full of spots like that.

• Are people playing fit-or-fold?
• Do they bet/fold a lot?
• Are they just calling your flop cbets and hoping you slow down ( as opposed to playing back at your flop cbets)?
• Do turn or river barrels often get the job done where flop bets don't?

If the answer to these questions is pretty consistently yes, then people are playing wildly unbalanced lines. Very few live NLHE players at these stakes have the stomach to stack off as lightly as necessary for anything close to GTO. If people are folding 75% of the time when you raise them, never calling you to showdown with a one pair hand, you really don't need a solver to tell you the GTO way to play against that line.

What we all need is judgment on how much exploitation you can get away with before they adjust. That's a huge live poker skill that AFAIK lies outside of the mainstream of game theory, although there is probably some enhanced theory of playing against unbalanced opponents that become less unbalanced if they see you exploiting them.

But I haven't played with solvers, and I'm sure they're great for just improving general intuition about ranges.



(What would be your local 2-5 or 3-5 game, at the Muckleshoot? I haven't been there in ages so I don't know how well people play there.)


I don't understand this. There are lots of purchases I could investigate for 2 minutes that wouldn't be good purchases.

I think what BK is saying is if you think you *might* find value from it, you definitely will. I can't really identify with you guys, like I'm pretty good at poker but I still have spots every single day where I know I'm just guessing. I would sure like to have the ability to check those spots and see what the quasi-GTO solution looks like!

Exactly.

Yes. That’s pretty much the experience I’m looking for from a solver. Are you using them DD?

This has been a really eye opening discussion

To what, curiously?

As to how little work people are willing to put in to get better at poker. It certainly explains why the rare 40/80 holdem game I sit in is like hopping in a time machine that takes me right back to 2009. With more rake.

In general it's sort of crazy to me how little the average live player works on their game (typically not at all). Like if I'm not constantly trying to get better, my assumption is that my opponents are (even though they probably aren't) and that any edge I may have had will be taken away from me. Since April or so my time has been spent working on:

1. Finding the willpower to quit poker

2. NLHE (Pio)

3. Big O (PPT range vs range and hand vs range, usually starts as hand vs hand out of curiosity)

4. PLO (training videos, PPT, should have monker but don't)

5. A-5 and 2-7 limit single draw (hand written MDF vs river bet for every hand I think I should have in a 1v1 situation along with opponent specific ranges if I've seen them show up with a river bet that shouldn't exist)

6. Short deck (hand written hand vs hand of basically all hands, hand vs range, establishing some sort of preflop starting range % loosely based on online 6m nlhe aggregate open % of winning regs)

7. LHE hands in Pio a few times when I'm super bored and because occasionally I see a hand here that I'm curious what it should look like, and also one I played recently

Like it's not like I'm constantly studying or anything. Multiple days go by where I put in 0 poker work and a lot of the above stuff is minimal work. Single draw limit and short deck took a long time since I'm not the smartest guy and had to write everything by hand to figure stuff out. PLO was taking a long time because videos are long and boring and I'm a pretty bad PLO player so I had to really focus. NLHE is typically just 1 hand now and then that I thought I played poorly or am curious about but the 1 hand will often take 30+ minutes to study.

Because 2 or 3 people asked opinions about an expensive and apparently difficult to use computer program, that means that people are willing to put very little work into getting better at poker? Seems to me like you need to put some work into your inferences. I'd say that implies the opposite.

Nah, i'm with sean. The amount of laziness and lack of work ethic I've seen first hand is quite incredible to me as well.

Nobody wants to spend any time working on stuff. I know quite a few poker players and almost none of them are actively working alone/with me. A few of them will pop in occasionally with enough pressure from me, but generally aint nobody got time for that. I guess schneids did some mix game studying a bit ago now that I think about it. Ok, so one person. ha. And avoidthe9to5 but he's just a beast

EVERYONE PLAYS BAD, WHO NEEDS TO STUDY?!

If you've seen it first hand, that's maybe an appropriate inference. But he was saying this discussion showed him that people didn't want to work on things. When it shows the opposite as far as I can tell.

Agree w sean and Bk. My live game has a player pool of probably like 20-30 reg pros and I would guess <5 of them know what monker or pio even are. And 0 of them have it. Nobody tries to get better at live poker they just try to find creative ways to max their EV by like seat changing better or finding a bigger fishy to play with.

Rob I think most people including those in this thread like to plan how to do something rather than actually do it.

If you don't really have the option to move up to a bigger game and you're beating your current one for something reasonable it's pretty hard to find the motivation to grind GTO solutions when you could just be playing poker. It might be +EV long term but most people who play poker were drawn to it because it more or less provides instant gratification.

It doesn't count if you just study and coach and only play a few hands a month so you can post chip porn on insta 🤣

pretty sure he's getting his

Anybody take the chemistry SAT II back in the day where they had a question with a cause and an effect and the options were

(a) Cause is wrong, effect is wrong.
(b) Cause is wrong, effect is right.
(c) Cause is right, effect is wrong.
(d) Cause is right, effect is right, and cause explains effect.
(e) Cause is right, effect is right, but cause does not explain effect.

People not wanting to buy solvers and people not wanting to improve is definitely (e).

yeah this is me. monker should have put a disclaimer on their site esp since support refuses to respond and they pretty much commissioned all of the support out to one guy that charges 75 pounds a half hour for help on skype.
i've had monker for like 2-3 weeks and have only run the hu lhe sim. still can't even figure out if i'm building my trees correctly. too many nodes to keep track of...
i mean, their site says, need 16gb ram, and can run omaha and 6way sims. no mention of needing to rent servers anywhere. i'd guess at least half of the people are getting it for omaha. good luck with 16gb.

good luck with 256 gigs of ram for omaha8. lol 16gb