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

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

(This is part 2, part one)

In 2013, after we made a deal about Holdem solver, Trueteller mentioned that solving 2-7 Triple Draw (

18 January 2025 at 07:08 PM
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72 Replies


Earlier posts are available on our legacy forum HERE

by Laegoose

Primarily because it's a personal and professional story that I'm proud of.
Also I'm still selling solvers

More like primarily because you're still selling solvers and trying to gain exposure / more business 😉


by Laegoose

Primarily because it's a personal and professional story that I'm proud of.
Also I'm still selling solvers

How do I get the full list of products and prices?


Hello!

I've made a youtube video on history of poker solvers and I've included part of this story. Ejnoy!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mnuwnsiz...


Oleg,

Thanks for this thread. I'm curious if other players in the big mixed game work with their own solvers or have purchased your services. I'm also curious what games have the biggest gap in terms of solver play vs top players skills.


Ugh this all disgusts me. The OP disgusts me and the excitement shown by most of the posters makes it worse.


I just want to know:

A list of all the games he has solvers available for
And the price attached to each

I think I need this product!!! (and I didn't know I needed it until he made the thread/until I knew I needed it 😀 )


by dadjoey

Oleg,

Thanks for this thread. I'm curious if other players in the big mixed game work with their own solvers or have purchased your services

Some people are purchasing my services.

Some have tools of their own, mostly rudimentary solvers or calculators as far as I know.

Some are just brilliant at raw learning and playing the game and exploiting opponents. There are few of them nowadays but they exist

I'm also curious what games have the biggest gap in terms of solver play vs top players skills.

Regarding the gap, I would say in NL Holdem the gap is the smallest. Top pros are damn good at NL Holdem. In all other games, there is gap.

Besides the loserate of a human against the machine, we also need to consider learnability. I would say:

Draw games are learnable

Razz and OFC are somewhat learnable

Omaha is hard to learn from pure solver training. There are just too many flops, ranges are hard to reason about, and patterns are hard to understand. It is also a UI issue, modern omaha training tools can't even show you a player's range on a single screen properly


Regarding Gus Hansen, he is a very strong and talented player. It's just he chose to compete against the absolute best, no surprise he lost


If Trueteller didn't tell Phil Ivey about his solver this is this is honestly kind of scummy


I wish the trainer was still working.


by a_r_K

If Trueteller didn't tell Phil Ivey about his solver this is this is honestly kind of scummy

He obviously didn't.


by a_r_K

If Trueteller didn't tell Phil Ivey about his solver this is this is honestly kind of scummy

I used to play NL50, that's 50 cents, on PS 10 years ago. The entire reg zoom pool used PIO solver.

Isn't there some expectation when you're a world-famous pro flying around in your Falcon 2000 that opponent tool use might be a possibility?


by JudgeHoldem1850

I used to play NL50, that's 50 cents, on PS 10 years ago. The entire reg zoom pool used PIO solver.

Isn't there some expectation when you're a world-famous pro flying around in your Falcon 2000 that opponent tool use might be a possibility?

A couple of years could make a big difference as far as this goes.
In 2013 I could see someone not expecting solvers to be a thing.

In 2025 anyone who thinks online isn't filled with collision bots and rta is either naive or an idiot.


Draw solver demo is working at https://draw.olegsolvers.com – if it doesn't DM me a screenshot with a problem


by JudgeHoldem1850

I used to play NL50, that's 50 cents, on PS 10 years ago. The entire reg zoom pool used PIO solver.

Isn't there some expectation when you're a world-famous pro flying around in your Falcon 2000 that opponent tool use might be a possibility?

they absolutely did not, piosolver came out to the public near the end of 2015 lol


Well I had a copy around then and so did everyone else — or knew of and had access to it — in the HUNL forum, in which posted most zoom regs.

Edit: I should have clarified I am talking about the HUNL zoom pool. I never played 6 max then.


by Laegoose

Draw solver demo is working at https://draw.olegsolvers.com – if it doesn't DM me a screenshot with a problem

Can you remove the need to login with google please. Seems completely unnecessary to demo something. thanks.


Very interesting read! Can't believe how much time has passed now since these events.

Were there any parts of the 2-7 solver's strategy that you found particularly interesting? The authors of a paper published in Science made a big deal out of the simplicity of the optimal HU-LHE preflop strategy (link). I'd like to hear if you found anything particularly striking, especially in the heads-up strategy.


by philnewall

Very interesting read! Can't believe how much time has passed now since these events.Were there any parts of the 2-7 solver's strategy that you found particularly interesting? The authors of a paper published in Science made a big deal out of the simplicity of the optimal HU-LHE preflop strategy (link). I'd like to hear if you found anything particularly striking, especially in

This is a good point.

I am v v interested in the story but due to flaws in my poker thinking I've neglected to consider the nuts and bolts of the solver.

(HU)NLHE is my game.

Therefore: outside of the incident with trueteller knowing the solver was legit when... the turn card paired the board and the solver recommended a lead.

Were there any parts of the NLHE solver strategy that was -interesting -nonintuitive -whatever?


by Johnny Doe

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?

They weren't great players out of the womb. They figured out how to beat the game themselves rather than copying what a computer does. That is more impressive.


by easygoingT

after rewatching the NOSEBLEED poker documentation on youtube I discovered the following conversation at min 53:friend: "did you get any action online (while beeing in london for a week for a break of vegas/wsop end of june 24)?"seb86:"... some 2/4 deuce against trueteller and san1ker (raulg) ..."friend:"how do they play by the way?"seb86:"they both decent now"alexonmoon (from

another quote to this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hq6675cy...

in this joeingram1 podcast from september 2016 he says at min 1:29 that his biggest downswing ever was a 2.5 Mio USD swing playing the germans in 2014


Another great story / thread Laegoose, thanks for sharing!

by NickMPK

A while back, I started a thread here suggesting that Hold-em would be improved if you dealt two dead cards face-up at the start of the hand. I struck me that, while this would have almost no effect on recreational poker play, it would make it an order of magnitude harder for solvers to find solutions, and several orders of magnitude harded to memorize them.The fact that OP wa

Was and still is a very good idea imo.


Very curious about the hand example posted, specially the 4 bet after first draw.

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