Most tournament players don’t lose because they make catastrophic punts. They lose because they make small, repeated mistakes in spots they assume are “standard”. The problem is, poker solvers have taught us that these spots are far from standard, meaning that when you autopilot through them, you’re giving your edge away.
Let’s take a look at 3 such spots you might be autopiloting and explore what the solvers do instead.
The Standard Cbet
You raise A8s on the button with 40bb effective stacks and only the big blind calls. The flop comes 986 rainbow and your opponent checks. This is a spot where many players continuation bet far more often than they should. They see 2nd pair good kicker on a somewhat safe board and assume they should usually (if not always) be betting. But the solver disagrees. With A8s it bets less than 30% of the time. In fact, the solver checks back most 8x hands at medium to high frequency, doing the same with hands like A7, A6, and A5. Overcards with a gut shot hand like QJo, QTo, which many players love to barrel, bet less than half the time. 77 rarely bets and perhaps most surprisingly, hands like 76s and 65s, good for bottom pair plus a straight draw (aka a recreational player’s dream flop) never bet.
In playing this board like this, the solver teaches us that we need to be far more disciplined when considering cbetting hands that struggle to play against a check-raise. Instead, we can choose to take our equity to the turn and get comfortable playing a two-street game.
The Standard Reshove
This is the type of spot that was very popular pre-solvers, but many players have yet to adapt.
You’re in the big blind with 15bb and the button opens. Your instinct might be to ‘reshove’ wide in order to apply pressure and pick up the pot, but once again, the solver disagrees. In fact, it has almost no pure bluff 3-bets here. The weakest hands that shove are low offsuit Ax, as well as JTs and 98s a tiny percentage of the time.
Everything else just calls. Suited connectors like 87s, broadways like QJs, low suited aces – all hands you see reshoved constantly at this depth – prefer to call. What solver work has taught us is that this isn’t a spot you need to commit all your chips on guessing whether your opponent has a hand or not. Instead, you can take the opportunity to bring a decent hand to the flop.
The Standard ‘Apply Pressure’ Bet
You open the button to 2bb off a 20bb stack and the big blind 3-bets. Many players instinctively 4-bet shove here with hands like small pairs, suited connectors, and suited aces—wanting to “apply max pressure.” But the solver sees it differently. Despite the shallow stacks, or perhaps because of them, it only shoves 18% of the time, preferring to flat more than twice as often with 44% of its range.
Its jams are primarily composed of high offsuit Ax hands, a few suited aces like AK A5, and a sprinkle of good broadway combos like KTs and KQo.
Most interestingly, the solver never shoves AA-QQ, barely ever with JJ, and less than half the time with TT. That means those hands plus everything else – all lower pairs, all suited aces, all lower offsuit Ax hands, all suited connectors, all broadways – always play as calls.
The lesson being that it’s better to call with hands that have good equity realization, but don’t perform well when your opponent calls. If you’re routinely jamming in this spot with “pretty” hands, you’re applying pressure in the wrong place and bleeding chips in the process.
Ultimately, unlike in cash games, solvers have taught us that winning poker tournaments isn’t about who’s the most aggressive, but who will make fewer mistakes. Which is why we need to stop treating “standard” spots as automatic and see them as the battlegrounds they are.
