If you ever feel overwhelmed trying to memorize GTO solutions, don’t feel bad because you’re not alone. Most players who try to add solver work to their game approach it the wrong way. They run through dozens of solutions and try to memorize hundreds of data points. Unless you’re some sort of poker savant whose memory has no limitations, that’s not going to be very effective. Instead, the goal should be to understand the underlying principles that drive the solver’s decisions so you can apply them across the board. Let me show you an example.
You’re playing a tournament and raise from the hijack (two seats to the right of the button) with a 30bb stack. Only the big blind calls. Now take 3 seemingly similar flops: 876ss, 987ss, T98ss. Although these flops look nearly identical, the solver uses a wildly different c-betting strategy for each of them.
On the 876ss board, the solver only c-bets 12% of the time. But change just one card, making it 987 instead of 876, and suddenly the solver’s c-bet frequency jumps to 88%. Change just one card again to T98 and now the solver bets 97% of the time! Discovering pivot points such as these is useful in itself, but even more helpful is then figuring out why the solver does what it does. With a little digging, the answer to this particular pivot is clear.
As the in-position preflop aggressor, you raise far more Tx hands than 9x hands (you raise all of the offsuit broadway cards with a ten, but only K9o with a 9 – which is raised less than a third of the time.) This means that your range connects far more strongly with 987 compared to 876 since the former gives you the top end of an open-ended straight draw (789 plus your 10) while also making it possible for you to have the nuts (JTo is a raise from the hijack, while 9To is not). The T98 board hits your raising range even harder. So hard, in fact, that the solver bets nearly its entire range. The higher the run, the more it connects to your raising range, the higher the frequency of the c-bet. And it’s in the last two parts of that sentence, that we find the real worth of solver work. Yes, it’s nice to know how to play a rundown board with two cards of the same suit, but the true value is in extracting the principle behind the decision.
The more the board favors your range, the more aggressively you can c-bet your hand. On Axx you’ll c-cbet more often than on 7xx. When the board is KQ5 you’ll bet more often than when it’s 954. On JJT, you’ll bet more often than when it’s 887.
Suddenly, we have a solver-based heuristic that we can apply to a wide variety of situations at the poker table without the need to memorize endless variations: Your c-bet frequency will follow your range advantage up and down the board.
That’s how non-professionals should be using solvers: not trying to learn every combination of every hand, but understanding the “why” behind the solver’s decisions and applying it to as many spots as you can. That’s what will actually help you make more money at the table.
