- Hey everyone, this is Uri Peleg,
and you'll never guess what
this video is gonna be about.
It's gonna be about solvers.
(upbeat music)
When I first heard about solvers,
I had a reaction of intense curiosity.
I was finally gonna get the answers
to all the questions I've
ever had about poker.
And I was really, really excited about it.
But this emotion very quickly
switched to a different one
when I saw that it was expensive software,
needed a strong computer,
there were a million parameters to put in,
and the output you get, the
answer you get in the end,
is something that you
just can't make sense of.
So rather than answering your questions,
it just looked kind of weird.
Be that as it's may,
solvers have stayed
with us over the years,
and I've definitely become
very well acquainted with them.
These days we see so many people
betting 1/3 pot all the time,
which is something that you'd
never see before solvers
and there are a million other examples.
In this video, I'm gonna take
you guys on the first step
of actually understanding solvers.
And that's gonna be by explaining
how they actually generate the solution,
what's the algorithm behind
solving the game of poker.
Okay, so to understand how solvers work,
the first thing you need to understand
is about something called max exploit.
Max exploit, means that,
given that you know one
player's complete strategy,
you calculate the best
exploitative response,
the best possible highest
EV response to that.
The way this is done in practice,
is pretty easy for a computer.
If you know someone's entire strategy,
you can calculate the EV for
each option that you have,
and then just pick the highest EV option.
So a computer can just go through
everything in a long list,
pick the highest EV decision
for every hand and every situation.
And at that point you
have your max exploit.
So once we understand the max exploit is,
we can understand how the solver works.
The way the solver reaches a solution,
is it starts out by doing
everything completely random.
Every strategic option
is taking an equal amount of the time.
And player two then exploits that,
it's not exactly max exploit,
but he takes his strategy
in that direction.
So we talked about how you
can calculate the max exploit,
now we're gonna use it, and
we have the random strategy
for player one, the
exploitative one for player two.
And the next step will be player one,
now recalculating a new
strategy to exploit player two.
Once he's done this,
player two will go ahead
and calculate a new strategy
to exploit player one.
This process is gonna keep
going on and on and on,
it sounds a bit repetitive,
but every step of the way,
the strategies get better and better,
and they get more difficult to exploit
until in the end you have
a strategy that's so good,
you could put your strategy on
the wall for the world to see
and there's nothing
anyone could do about it.
This sounds pretty amazing.
The strategy to end all strategies,
no more leveling wars,
no more tough decisions.
You just execute and print money.
And this type of idea has
been the holy grail of poker.
(dramatic music)
Unfortunately, in the real
world, it's way too complicated,
and anyone who tries to
implement this invariably fails.
And when you do this,
90% right and 10% wrong,
the entire thing falls apart.
It doesn't work unless
you get it all perfect.
Imagine that you have one guy,
who's spent his entire life crafting
an indestructible suit of armor.
This is the guy who
starting with the solver,
he's making his game indestructible.
And all of his focus is on his armor.
He's always looking inwards,
because if the armor is indestructible,
he doesn't care who's
coming up against him.
But unfortunately, 10% to 20% of his armor
is riddled with holes.
Now then this guy sent him to battle,
he's obviously not gonna do too well.
His eyes are closed, he's looking inside,
and his armor is filled with holes.
So anyone who can see what's going on,
can just attack those holes
and tear him to pieces.
This is probably one
of the most common ways
to misuse solvers, and
it's very counterproductive
and it takes a lot of
time and a lot of energy
and you feel like you're
building something,
but the thing that you're building
is kind of taking on the wrong direction.
My approach, a Guerrilla poker
approach to using solvers
is to go back to the roots
of how solvers actually work
and how they generate their solutions.
That's it for today, guys.
In the next video,
I'm gonna be going over a
high stakes hand history.
We'll see some cool pio solver effects,
I hope to you see then,
and if you like this one,
press one of the YouTube
buttons on the screen.
I don't remember which one,
but that there's a button
there you're supposed to press.
See you next time.
