Are solvers bad for poker?

Are GTO solvers a natural evolution of the game or something we should be trying to prohibit?

Last week enthusiastic poker wunderkind posted one of his custom Twitter polls, this time on the subject of whether solvers were good or bad for poker.

Do you think solvers are good or bad for poker?

Explain your reasoning if you feel so inclined 😁

— Landon (@LandonTice) May 29, 2021

Tice refers to himself as a ‘child of the sim’, somebody who has learnt the game in the solver era. I think he was a little bit surprised at how unfavourably solvers were looked at by the wider poker world. 64.4% polled said they were bad for the game and a lot of heated comments backed that up.

Are they as bad as his polling suggests?

The current 'boogieman' of poker

Solvers really have been the boogieman of poker for the last few years. Some people think that simply using them is cheating even though they are used away from the tables as part of study. This is not to confuse them with Real Time Assistance, which is a much more worrying prospect and certainly falls into the category of cheating.

The people who fear solvers the most are ironically the ones who have the least to worry. Most solvers provide a game theory optimal solution to a poker situation, that is one which would be breakeven if your opponent was also playing GTO. Solvers do not find the most profitable way to play a hand, they provide a strategy to avoid being exploited.

Solvers, therefore, most significantly negatively impact elite players against other elite players. A professional player is much better served if they play an exploitative strategy against a recreational player, not a solver approved GTO strategy. 

The same critics of solvers greatly overestimate what a solver is capable of doing, or at least what it enables a human to do. A solver is only as good as the person who uses it. It is dependent on the player inputting a number of correct assumptions about how their opponent is playing, not least their likely range of hands. Get that wrong and a solver is useless a lot of the time.

Formats need to adapt to be less solvable

For recreational players the worst thing about solvers are the optics. Everyone new to online poker fears the game is rigged so when they hear of these things that ‘solve’ the game, it rings alarm bells. The idea that a bunch of ‘GTO Wizards’ are playing perfectly because they have unfairly acquired skills, like in that scene from the Matrix, is a compelling and persistent concern for casual players.

That doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be concerned, however. You only need to look at how Limit Hold’em is all but dead these days to see how toxic the potential for ‘solving’ a format can be. I personally believe poker will adapt to this genuine threat from solvers by embracing and creating harder to solve formats, like PKOs.

If you have been around poker for a long time you’ll have heard these doomsday predictions about something killing the game. Believe it or not, poker players feared televised poker would kill the game by sharing too many secrets to the masses. Training sites and tracking software have also been the ‘boogieman’ that would kill poker in years gone by.

Those things arguably have all helped the growth of poker by empowering so many people to play the game well. I won’t quite make the same argument for solvers, but I would say that my own personal interest in poker has been reinvigorated by solvers because they often provide some very counterinitiative insights into the game.

The real enemy for poker is Real Time Assistance and bots, but we cannot ignore how damaging solving a format entirely can be. I think that is a long way off for No Limit and maybe never for formats like PKOs. Poker will have to adapt to a future where everyone learns by solver, but it has always been the case that the modern game evolves more rapidly than most people are comfortable with. 

Do you fear solvers in poker? Let us know in the comments: