How I created Draw Solver, made a million dollars, and helped to take down Phil Ivey

congrats to them for managing to get access to a solver before other players, an incredible achievement

Phil Ivey was the best to ever do it, so it makes sense that OP is pretty proud of himself.

When I had approached new customers with an offer to buy Holdem solver, or existing customers with an offer to buy a solver for a new variant, I got plenty of rejections. A decision to invest money and time into a new product and studying a new variant isn't obvious

heh I woulda paid for that

Yea, this is why the ultra high stakes world just seems very boring to me. It's a competition of sweaty tryhards.

Reminds me of how Bobby Fischer advocated for Fischer Random as a way to compensate for chess becoming a pure memorization test. Take away the ability to memorize approaches and you create a more flexible test of skill. I've always found the Ivey and Isildur types more impressive than nerds who grind data. Maybe I just bought into the myth of the natural talent crusher too much. Either way, if I ever binked a life-changing score, you'd never see me sit down with guys like this who are grinding every tool at their disposal to take my money. It ceases to become a game at that point. It's just work.

+1, I love how the OP missed the sarcasm…

Even in the earliest of online days when reading 2p2 and seeing that people were using HUD’s and playing at same time etc. I recognized I would never put more than $100 online. All I could think was “so I’m essentially playing against a machine?”

If you have a background in individual sports, you are likely to feel a certain type of way when you recognize these aspects of online poker, and even if the profitability transitions too well to live poker eventually you will lose all action (as OP stated), alert the opponents to what they are unaware of and the magnitude of your learning, which is counter intuitive, to me.

I think those that were “ahead” of the general knowledge of a game, prior to hardcore electronic computation work. Were using the same tools from a statistical perspective, but made sure that their abilities blended well with the players they were profitable against. I think thats why the likes of Ivey and Doyle did so well for so long.

I was also told (not sure how true) that during the early days of Bobby’s room Doyle and others were actually doing hand calculations with paper and pencils on calling/raising ranges for numerous games etc. So I know its nothing new but the access has made it even hard for the best to be profitable without using it, and that will eventually hinder poker’s progress.

cool story

yes, glad you're still posting

How is someone just getting lucky to be born with a natural talent more impressive than someone putting insane amount of work to get good?

Stud about to make a comeback imo

You win the thread.

What the OP did was very impressive and I would have done the same thing given the opportunity and if I had the ability. It's an interesting post. But "I remember that the computer said to call 20% of the time here and my RNG says call so I call" is boring and "I'm using a strategy I largely came up with on my own, vs your strat and nobody knows for sure who is right and I'm trying to read you and get inside your thought process and test your courage" is fun.

So Ivey, Doyle & Chip just sort of showed up and played? Hellmuth hasn’t made any adjustments in 35 years?

If there's an objectively right play in every spot and people use tools to arrive at those solutions then arguably there ceases to be anything distinct or unique about the players themselves. There is no music if everyone is just playing the same notes at the same time because it's objectively optimal. There is no longer a "playing style". The differentiation stems from who can memorize the best data most accurately. It is a competition between two players comparing homework.

If we look at how poker was packaged to the general public at its peak in the zeitgeist (mid 00s), there was a huge emphasis on the personalities and play styles of the individual players. You had the "wild and crazy" Gus Hansen, the telepathic "feel player" Daniel Negreanu, the conservative Dan Harrington, the unstable Mike Matusow. In a solved game with objectively optimal decisions, you lose some of that differentiation and personality. I don't think this entirely explains why poker is not as mainstream now as in the 00s, but I don't think it helps. If the game is less about dynamic strategies and more about rote memorization then it becomes more akin to a spelling bee than a mental boxing match. There is very limited individual expression in such an endeavor, which arguably lowers the intrigue for the audience.

I think a memorization contest is less interesting as an entertainment product to sell to casual dreamers, and probably less interesting from the perspective of a player. If I'm competing against a player in a relatively unexplored variant and he's using his time away from the table to develop a solver and grind data then the playing field will only be level if I commit similar time and energy. The battle of wits is now less about what happens at the poker table and more about what happens away from it. The nature of the competition shifts further away from improvisation towards preparation. I can only speak for myself, but I find that less compelling.

To get back to your actual question, we can maybe draw a parallel to a sport like basketball. Most players cannot do a 360 dunk regardless of how much they "study". It requires unusual raw innate talent. It's impressive to see a 360 dunk because it is difficult, almost to the point of seeming impossible for a mere mortal. On the other hand, a much higher percentage of players can learn to shoot free throws and mid-range jumpers with good efficiency. Even a good varsity high school player may be able to shoot the ball well from a variety of spots on the court. Routine plays like that tend not to make the highlight reels. In poker, Isildur 6-tabling Dwan/Ivey/Antonius simultaneously in a variant he seems to have barely studied is more akin to a display of freakish raw talent than someone hiring a programmer to build a triple draw solver to derive an edge. One is "I could never do that" and the other is "I would never want to do that". It's raw talent vs. sheer desire and force of will.

At the absolute top levels of both games, the dichotomy may disappear. A player like Steph Curry represents the synergy of raw talent and rote memorization in the sense that he somehow shoots more efficiently than all the other tryhard freakish talents. He not only works very hard, but also seems to have some innate talent that allows him to shoot with outlier range and accuracy compared to his peers. The poker equivalent in 2025 may be some nosebleed online or Triton reg who grinds all the data and somehow exercises a big edge over all the other tryhards who are also putting in the same level of work. If the work is equivalent, but the results are superior then there must be some type of skill-based edge. If that's the poker you want to see then there's a lot of it available, but I think the reason why people remain so fascinated with figures like Ungar, Ivey, and Isildur is because feats of superhuman innate talent are more alluring than efficiently executing pre-planned strategies from rote study.

Doyle hand dealt poker's basic probabilities back when nobody knew them.

Doyle is a God.

So was Gus right all along that he was effectively being cheated by people using dream machines? He was also much worse and an addicted gambler so it’s not surprising he dusted off 8figs, but he has proclaimed all along he was cheated so he was right essentially.

Yeh he def sucked, was wondering because he said there was a team who were using a ‘dream machine’ which I assume was a silver etc.

To me someone good at figuring things about on their own and in the case of poker, who can play a ton of different games well is way more impressive than someone who studies well and specializes in one game.

If you invent a new game (or even add wrinkles to current games),the people who figure them it the fastest are way more impressive to me than someone who would need someone else/a solver to figure them out so they can then study it for years to get good.

I'm way more impressed by a doctor or scientist who figured something out 150 years ago than I am by a first year medical student knowing the same thing today because he learned it in a class this week.

Didn't Ben 86 have a dream machine?

Great post. But don't overthink this part. I'm fairly sure a huge reason poker isn't as mainstream now is because at No Limit Holdem variants, fish get slaughtered at cheatcode rates if they don't put in the aforementioned nerd work. And anyone who doesn't do the work commensurate with his stakes is a fish.

The fact that for 99% of the population, the game is far worse than a slot machine has now percolated through the public mind.

Awesome post OP.

I got into poker around this time, the guys I looked up to were the online high stakes guys from 2012-2017. Reading interviews of these guys about putting in the work motivated me so much, I studied a lot (and failed I'll admit) to get better.

It's kind of sad that a lot of the winners were just people who had access to the most advanced technology, OP has shared his NLHE and TD solvers. There's no doubt now that a PLO solver was knocking about around a similar time. Additionally, the likelihood of the massive FLO8 games on FT having solver help with the winners is super high.

For a decade now solvers have been available, I frighten to think how these have been developed with so much money available. The game has been just an arms race for the past decade.