Today we are releasing long anticipated preflop solver. It's now possible to solve preflop heads-up spots in Holdem. The game starting from preflop is humongous that's why we make it possible to to run the solver using subset of flops instead of all 1755 strategically different ones. That combined with heavy memory optimizations and careful selection of the preflop subsets make it possible to run many preflop spots having only 32GB of RAM and it should be very powerful already with 64GB. That is a huge progress taking into account that full preflop trees - even with very simplified postflop play measure in several and often in tens of terabytes.

We realize running 64GB trees is not enough for perfectionists out there so PioSOLVER-edge now runs on cloud instances as well as dedicated servers. You should be able to get instances with 256GB or 512GB of RAM paying reasonable price.

Not everyone has time or technical knowledge to set their own dedicated servers though. To help on this front as well we are making PioCloud available. PioCloud is a service run by one of our more dedicated users. The idea is that you could request calculations to be done and shipped to you. The pricing is going to be very competitive comparing to running it yourself on Amazon's EC2 and similar services. PioCloud will also offer full preflop packs for games like HU SNG in the near future. Check it out HERE.

You may want to ask how good solutions calculated on subset of flops are. The answer is that they are very good and almost an exact match with ones run on all 1755 flops. We've compared some solutions to some private teams who get it done on either all flops or very big subsets (like half the flops) and the differences in strategies are very small and in EVs practically non-existent.

Another good news is that preflop solver will be part of edge version of PioSOLVER. This means our edge customers get it for free and pro customers can upgrade to edge version paying little more than the difference in the price, HERE.

We've decided to just add preflop solver to edge license which means edge customers get 2 activations of fully functional postflop and preflop solver (and customers who bought the edge version before or buy it in 5 coming days are getting 3 of them).

With the new preflop solver you can:

1. Run HU spots with standard structure (SB being in position)
2. Run HU spots with reversed structure (SB being OOP)
3. Run 6max spots where everyone folded to the big blind with predefined stealing range (for example BTN stealing 50% to 2.5bb, SB folding and you can solve for BB defending and BTN continuations from here)
4. Lock nodes preflop to determine how preflop strategy would change if you know what the opponent is doing
5. Make full tree saves (humongous) as well as preflop + flop which are reasonably small (usually less than 100mb)
6. Browse full trees from preflop to rivers (although that is yet to be polished in PioViewer)
7. Run postflop spots: while the new solver is slower and less precise than the current one for those, it also uses 3x less memory.

All this means that what was a task for a super computer costing tens of thousands of dollars up to now becomes a matter of PioSOLVER-edge license and not so huge electricity bill.

Make sure to watch the preflop quick start video:

Check out the edge license and upgrades to edge: HERE.

 The preflop solver is a big step towards getting to the truth in Holdem. While it was heavily tested it's still a big project with a lot of functionality. The bugs are going to surface, the feature requests will be made. Our focus will be on improving it in the coming days and weeks.