Feature Overview

We believe PioSOLVER is the most powerful tool which was ever made publicly available on poker market. Here is a summary of what makes it special comparing to other tools:

1. PioSOLVER has amazing performance characteristics.

While "state of the art" solvers developed by university teams run on thousands of cores the results look impressive. Once you attempt to run them on normal but still pretty powerful computers though the reality kicks in - even solving simple river games takes half a minute or longer and still heavy abstraction is needed.

Not anymore! With PioSOLVER all you need is a high end laptop or average few years old desktop and 8GB of RAM (16 for really big trees). You will still get your typical flop situations solved in 1-5 minutes and things like river games with 6-8 bet sizes are solved in few seconds. All this without any lossy abstractions.

See some benchmarks here!

2. PioSOLVER has great tools to learn from and analyze the solutions:

  • Navigating the tree and getting strategy/EV/equity/range and even range for specific action is easy. You can easily show values for specific suits as well (not only hand groups like AQs)
  • There is a very useful Range Explorer which can be used as either independent equity calculator or opened in specific place in the tree and used to analyze ranges composition. It's very easy to visualize how GTO ranges really look like!
  • PioSOLVER implements vertical browsing - it's very easy to jump from one turn or river card to another and visually compare optimal strategies. You can use it for strategy view: LIKE THIS as well as any other view. Here is another example where we look at calling range against 3rd barrel on the river: CLICK. This is done by holding a ctrl key and using arrows (up/down for ranks, left/right for suits)
  • PioSOLVER offers aggregation reports. Those are reports about overall frequencies/EVs of actions on various runouts. Here is one example of such report for 2nd barrel in a 3bet pot: CLICK. As you can see 2nd frequency varies a lot from 90% on As turn to only 9% on 8h turn. This tool makes it easier to understand how turn/river cards influence optimal strategies and which cards are good for which player. You can download a sample report here.

3. PioSOLVER is great for high volume analysis:

  • When saving the solutions PioSOLVER offers various save-size options. You can save the whole tree (which is often several GB big) or part of it having PioSOLVER recalculating the missing parts on the fly when you browse. You can choose flop only saves (then turns are recalculated on the fly) or flop+turn saves which offer a perfect balance between hard drive space and speed of browsing (recalculating rivers is barely noticeable, usually takes about 200ms and is done automatically when you browse)
  • It's very easy to schedule calculations on many boards and have the solver do the work while you are outside or sleeping: CLICK. It's easy to generate your own library of saves. For some common cases you can get several hundred of them overnight.

4. Tree building interface is easy and quick to use.

  • It's easy to build and customize trees. You can add more bet sizes, remove some options and see how much your changes influence RAM requirements. You can save your tree configs and use them any time you want to analyze a hand. Click to see GIF demonstrating basic tree building functionality. This saves a lot of time and let you focus on learning from the solutions instead of spending a lot of time constructing them.
  • You can save your ranges as well as use arbitrary weights in them. You can also make operations on ranges like inverting them (useful for constructing 3bet/calling ranges).
  • While our tree building form is very powerful and should be enough for 99% of practical cases advanced users can build arbitrary trees using our easy to understand string format in their scripts.

5. PioSOLVER is very customizable.

  • You can choose your own color scheme, the way strategies are displayed, how dead hands are displayed, how averages are calculated, if the view is refreshed on-hover or on-click as well as many other visual settings.
  • You can choose recalc accuracy - the accuracy solver uses to recalcuate turns/rivers on the fly if you choose to use small saves
  • You can change units used for EV calculations. It's easy to display results as % of the pot, absolute results for lines as well as usual "fold is always 0" settings (which are the default).

6. More features:

  • You can change strategies manually and lock nodes to see how the equilibrium play with assumptions about opponent's play look like. This can be used for what is sometimes called minimally exploitive calculations as well as just for fun and experimenting.
  • You can round resulting strategies to more human friendly values for example using 0, 25%, 50%, 75%, 100% scale (you can use any evenly spaced intervals for rounding). It's possible to round specific street or the whole tree.
  • You can run aggregation reports over many flops and look for information about average c-bet frequencies, check-raising frequncies etc.
  • It's easy to share tree configurations by simple copy-pasting them to/from chat and forums.

7. PioSOLVER is very advanced user/developer friendly:

  • PioSOLVER makes all its functionality available in a form of text interface. This can be used for programming your own tools based on the solver or writing more advanced scripts.
  • It's possible to access the solver's interface from our graphical interface PioViewer and execute arbitrary solver commands from there.
  • We expose a lot of advanced settings which influence the way the solver works, how often it displays information strings, if it uses isomorphisms and many more.

8. PioSOLVER is a very active project with growing community:

  • We have a very active discord group which is great for strategy talk, support as well just chatting about poker related things.
  • We are constantly improving the program. As of today (July 12th 2015) the solver is out on the market for only 4 months. You can see how much was done since the first release to this day here, here, here, here and finally here. We are very serious about making it the ultimate poker tool!
  • We are actively working with our users to improve the software and implement their suggestions (many mentioned features were done in response to incoming requests). Check out our support/suggestion thread on twoplustwo to get a glimpse (most of the communication happens on the Skype group these days).