Solvers
Please help me understand….
My problem with solvers is that villain has to be assigned a range. People say you’re allowed to do this or you can’t do that, but what if villain plays tighter or looser than what you assign him. It just seems to me all your deductions would be invalid if the range is off.
I take poker theory very seriously and just love learning about the game. Feel blessed to live in a time where great strides are taking place. A lot people smarter than me out there. I will be very thankful for anyone that can help me put this issue to rest.
7 Replies
The theory side of this is that the range Villain gets assigned is the best range for Villain to continue with. If Villain arrives at a certain spot with a different range than they are assigned, that means one of two things: either
1. Villain is going to be losing in this spot, or
2. If Villain is winning here, he lost enough to compensate for it in other spots you’re not looking at.
Here is an example. Suppose Villain has 3bet you preflop and you jam with AK. You know Villain is supposed to call with some assigned range and you know your EV against that range. Now say in reality Villain calls with only AA. Your EV against his calling range is super low now, but you have also made a ton from him folding a bunch of hands he was supposed to call with. And the fold equity is going to at least outweigh what happens when he has AA.
Still not completely clear to me, but this helps. Thanks
So, solvers are always expecting the best range for the situation. It’s up to me to determine if villain is deviating.
Is that the gist of it?
you can also tell the solver that one party deviates, and then see what that does
for example you can tell instead of 50% cbet, it just cbets 100% (or uses a different betsize etc)
and then you can check how preflop ranges/postflop ranges change because of that
Simple thing, but I think it explains a lot:
ITryDeuces said earlier:
You can only apply GTO to a spot where your previous actions in this particular hand were played with correct GTO.
Which is true in the sense that if you're solving a spot later in the hand (say you're solving flop->river), then you need to plug in good starting ranges, else the strategy will be exploitable in reality.
It actually confuses me more. GTO can no longer help you because you veered out of your lane. So, why does it have to be start to finish. Why can’t the computer adjust to the new parameters & give you the best solution for the current situation?
It can, you just have to adjust the solver's parameters to fit how your opponent is playing and solve for that.
