Postflopizer GTO Solver Update: Automatic Optimal Bet Sizes Finder

Contents

1. Background
2. Main Features
3. Inputting and Loading Hands
4. Node Locking
5. ICM And Tournament Support for PKO and KO
6. Cross Platform Support
7. Performance and Memory Use
8. GTO Trainer
9. Pricing
10. Conclusion

An article by Barry Carter

Background

While solver technology existed before, PioSOLVER is for many players the original post flop solver for Texas Hold’em. It was developed in 2015 and was the first solver tool used widely by professional poker players and is still the benchmark that other tools are judged by.

However, with PioSOLVER there has always been a barrier to entry in that it required a fair amount of technical knowledge to set up and use, which made some people question if PioSOLVER was worth it. If you are a technical wiz you will have no issue with PioSOLVER, but for a lot of players, it was a frustrating experience.

Step forward Postflopizer which was created to bridge the gap in the market for frustrated PioSOLVER users. It offers all of the main analytical features that PioSOLVER offers, while making the process of setting up hands easier and the analysis outputs simpler to understand. It was created by the same team that made ICMIZER, the popular preflop endgame analytical tool.

Main Features

How does PioSOLVER work? And is Postflopizer any different?

In a nutshell, both PioSOLVER and Postflopizer provide the same service. They are both post flop solvers you can use to study heads-up pots in cash games, MTTs or SNGs.

You input the key variables - the flop, stack size, pot size, bet sizes and the range of hands each player is likely to have. The solver will then show you how a perfect player would play in both seats. You can never expect to replicate what a solver does, but you can learn a great deal from trying to work out why it has done what it has done.

Both PioSOLVER and Postflopizer show you how they would act on every ‘node’ which is a decision point in a hand. For example, the first node in any hand is when the out-of-position player acts first on the flop (spoiler warning - most of the time they check). The second node is when the in-position player responds to the first node, and so on.

For example, this is how the in-position player acts when the out-of-position player checks to them on an A♦Q♥2♥ flop, in PioSOLVER:

The red hands are bets, the darker the red, the larger the bet. The green hands are checks. The grey squares are preflop folds that were never in the range. As you can see, the solver takes a mix of actions with most hands. Sometimes this will be because of blockers/flush draws and sometimes simply because the solver wants to mix their actions. When the in-position player acts, the out-of-position player responds accordingly, and so on. This is how they respond to a small bet:

The blue squares are folds.

Postflopizer displays this same information, although the colours are different:

Here the red squares are raises, the blue squares are calls and the purple squares are folds. There are even more colours used for different stages of the hand with more actions.

The other big visual difference compared to PioSOLVER is that more information is available on the screen. We can also see on the bottom right a breakdown of how each hand type plays. So for example, we can see that Sets make up 3.9% of the range and they are mixed between bets and calls.

This extra information on the screen allows us to simplify our analysis, which is useful if you are new to solvers and find looking at the hand grids overwhelming. It is also useful for identifying which hands are bluffs. One of the best lessons from solvers is understanding why they choose certain hands as bluffs over others (usually because of blocker or draw reasons) and seeing this information next to the range is very useful.

PioSOLVER has this function to but you have to open up a new window called Range Explorer:

A big advantage of PostFlopzer over PioSOLVER is you can display both players’ actions side by side:

This means you do not have to jump back and forth in your analysis. This is useful for when you are trying to work out why a hand acts in a certain way. A certain hand may bluff more, and it may be because it blocks a hand in the opponent’s range, which is easier to discern when the ranges are next to each other.

Solvers also show us other important information, such as Equity and Expected Value. Here is what the equity display looks like on PioSOLVER:

The green squares are strong hands, for example, AQs has 85.836% equity. The red squares are weak hands, for example, 65o has 10.663% equity. You can see the total equity in the top right. Likewise here are the expected values for the same range:

AQs makes 102.26 chips on average in this example and 65o loses 0.02 chips on average.

Postflopizer displays this information too, but once again the information can be displayed side by side. This is very useful for understanding range morphology and range advantage, two concepts that dictate how both players should play:

For example, here we have a capped range on the left (signalled by mostly medium strength and weak hands) against a linear range on the right (mostly strong hands). You can see this both by the side-by-side overall equity (40.7% vs 59.3%) and also by the shape and colour of the ranges. The linear range on the right has a lot of green hands and not many red weak hands. The capped range on the left has not much green and lots of weak yellow/red hands.

The correct strategy here would be for the capped player to check a lot and the linear player to bet a lot. It is much easier to identify why the solver does indeed take these actions when the two ranges are side by side.

When all actions on the flop are complete, we move on to the turn. But before you choose your turn card, both solvers allow you to study the impact of every possible turn card using a feature called Runout Analysis. This is what it looks like in PioSOLVER:

You can look at what the optimal strategy, EV and equity would be for each player on every possible turn card. This is what it looks like in Postflopizer:

In PioSOLVER a new window opens for Runout Analysis, in Postflopizer it appears at the top of the page, so once again you can look at your ranges to understand the analysis more easily.

One undeniable difference is Postflopizer is easier on the eyes. The interface is much simpler yet with more important information on the screen. There is also a much-needed table view which allows you to visualise the hand more easily, something which is missing in PioSOLVER. If you are familiar with Postflopizer’s sister tool ICMIZER, you will know this is the big difference between that and Hold’em Resources Calculator. Using ICMIZER and Postflopizer is much closer in experience to actually playing poker than their rival products.

If you are used to tools like PioSOLVER or GTOWizard, the colour scheme at Postflopizer can be a little jarring at first. Experienced solver users intuitively understand red means bet, green means call, blue means fold. However within that dark red means big bet and light red means small bet, with gradients in between reflecting bet sizes in between.

A wider palette of colours are used at Postflopizer to make the split between actions easier to identify. You can also choose a preffered palette in the settings menu:

If you are an advanced user you may struggle with this but new users, who have never used a solver before, will find it much easier.

Inputting and Loading Hands

One of the skills in using solver technology is knowing what information to feed into it. A solve is only as good as the assumptions you make about how your opponents play.

In PioSOLVER you type in the bet sizing, flop and pot size parameters manually like this:

Then you open the two range windows above to assign a range to each player:

The information you input can be saved for quicker use next time.

You can do this the same way in Postflopizer using ‘Advanced’ Mode:

But you can also use the ‘Quick’ Mode to more intuitively do it with a few clicks, rather than typing it all in manually:

Node Locking

Now that we are many years into the GTO revolution, the poker world’s attention has turned towards exploitative poker. Thankfully both PioSOLVER and Postflopizer have Node Locking, which teaches us about the best way to exploit weak opponents.

A GTO solver shows us how a perfect opponent would play against another perfect opponent in any situation. We can learn a great deal from that, but often it is not going to be our best option playing in real-life games. Node Locking allows us to adjust the solver’s strategy to reflect how your real-life opponents would play. So if your regular opponents would overfold on the turn, you can tell the solver to overfold on the turn. The solver will then adjust their strategy accordingly and show you the best way to exploit these leaks. Often it is not as simple as betting more on the street in question, sometimes the adjustments come earlier or later in the hand, or on different nodes entirely. However, it is important to note that the solver will play perfectly on either side of the locked node, so sometimes you have to lock several nodes to reflect a flawed human opponent.

PioSOLVER has two ways to node lock, an old style from the first version and a new style:

You pick a hand and change the action or frequency of that action, then ‘lock’ it meaning the solver has to take that action. So if the solver always bets with JJ but you think your opponent would always check, you can tell it to check instead. Often when forced to take an action, the solver will adjust its other actions (it may bet more with TT to compensate for JJ not betting), so you may have to lock those too.

Node locking is not easy on PioSOLVER, and the fact that both the old version and new version of the feature are available within the tool would suggest that users have struggled to get to grips with both. One of the reasons why Node Locking is difficult on PioSOLVER is that there is very little in the way of tutorial literature for it, both on the PioSOLVER website or on places like YouTube. A lot of users had to discover how to do it via trial and error, which is fine for the tech-savvy but not ideal for new users.

Node Locking on Postflopizer is much quicker and more intuitive. We also have a special article directly devoted to this feature: Node Locking in Postflopizer GTO Solver.

You can quickly run your cursor along the hand grid to change a hand’s actions, similar to using a paint tool. You can also more easily adjust actions for entire hand classes, for example, if you want all 2nd pair hands to fold you can adjust that in one button click. Finally, if you want to mix the actions of a hand (for example fold 75% and call 25%), there are both preset and custom mixed strategy buttons you can quickly paste onto hands. Node Locking on Postflopizer is much quicker and more intuitive.

The Node Locking feature on Postflopizer is a very obvious and significant user improvement made compared to PioSOLVER. Poker authors Dara O’Kearney and Barry Carter used Postflopizer for their book Beyond GTO: Poker Exploits Simplified and they said in an article on PokerStrategy.com:

I don't want to continually rag on PioSOLVER because it is a groundbreaking tool that I still use to this day. However, the one feature I find almost impossible to use is its node-locking feature.

That isn't an issue with Postflopizer. Node locking is simple and intuitive, it is usually just a few button clicks. I can say with some certainty that we could not have completed half the chapters in our new book if we had not had Postflopizer this year.

ICM And Tournament Support for PKO and KO

PioSOLVER offers limited ICM analysis of post flop hands. The post flop strategy when ICM is significant changes considerably and this is an area where a lot of players make errors.

To use this feature, you input the payout structures and the chip counts of all the remaining players in the tournament, not just you and your opponent. This feature is best used when you can make a side-by-side comparison with how the hand would play out in an otherwise identical non-ICM scenario. That way you can learn the most by identifying the differences between the two strategies. It will also show you what each player’s equity is currently worth in real money terms.

Postflopizer boasts full support of various tournament models including ICM, MTT ICM, PKO (Progressive Knockout Tournaments) and KO tournaments with hundreds of players still remaining in MTT.

Postflopizer is created by the same team that created ICMIZER and a lot of ICMIZER technologies related to tournament analysis are available in Postflopizer, including TrueBounty model for PKOs, MTT ICM model, etc.

Postflopizer comes with a preloaded set of tournmament payout structures from various poker rooms.

Unlike PioSolver, Postflopizer offers post flop analysis with bounties, so you can study PKO or KO spots. The modern poker world is shifting towards bounties over ‘vanilla’ tournaments and this is an important area of study.

Cross Platform Support

Postflopizer offers both Windows and Mac support.

PioSOLVER only works on Windows and doesn't have a native Mac client and will require a Windows VM to launch on Mac.

Performance and Memory Use

Both tools implement CFR+ algorithm for finding GTO solution. The performance of the tools is comparable, but in general PioSolver will be a little (10-20%) faster on larger percentage of calculations with Postflopizer being faster in a smaller percentage of situations.

In terms of Memory usage both tools use similar size of memory for the similar size of calculation trees. Tree size is usually directly proportional to the product of multiplication of OOP range on IP range on the number of nodes in the postflop tree.

GTO Trainer

PioSolver has a built in GTO Trainer that allows you to train using your simulations.

GTO Trainer is coming to Postflopizer in Summer 2024.

Pricing

Is PIOSolver worth it in 2024? Or should you choose Postflopizer instead?

Right now PioSOLVER offers two products, Pro and Edge. There are three versions of Postlopizer available - Basic, Pro and Nitro and each can be complimented by tournament support. This is what you get:

Postflopizer also offers monthly subscriptions that make it more accessible than PioSOLVER.

Is PioSOLVER a one time purchase? Yes, it is, however, you only get 1 year of updates and 1 activation with it. Postflopizer is offered as a subscription based tool, with free updates and doesn't require a one time lump sum investment. Subscriptions can offer 1 or 2 PC activations.

Conclusion

In terms of outputs and what you can learn from them, PioSOLVER and Postflopizer are essentially the same product. They both will show you how two GTO poker players would play their range against each other, given the parameters you input. The outputs would be near identical with the same parameters (unless we're perfoming Postflopizer tournament calculations that have no alternative in PioSOLVER, like PKO or large field MTT).

The big difference is in usability. PioSOLVER was designed with technical experts in mind and very little has been done since it was created to improve the user experience. Postflopizer has been created with frustrated PioSOLVER users in mind and people new to solver technology. The experience is simpler, the interface is cleaner and looks much more like poker at Postflopizer.

With many unmatched exciting features Postflopizer the only reason to pick PioSOLVER over Postflopizer is if you are a technical whizkid who is used to the old ways of running postflop calculations.

Contents

1. Free Postflopizer Test Drive with a Special Discount!
2. Join Our Postflopizer Discord Server
3. Explore Postflopizer: Your Edge in Complex Situations
4. How to Download and Access the Postflopizer Clienta>
5. How to Access This Offer Client
6. Types of Postflopizer Subscriptions - Cash Only or With Tournament Add-on
7. Exclusive Discount for Our Valued Customers
8. Why Postflopizer GTO Solver?
9. Stay Ahead of the Competition

Free Postflopizer Test Drive with a Special Discount!

We're thrilled to announce a free test drive with a duration of one month of our innovative GTO Solver Postflopizer with Tournament Support and ICM-based postflop MTT calculations. Access to this promotion is a based on invitations. If you have received an invitation from us via email it means that you're a part of the free test drive.

Regardless of getting access to the free test drive you can take advantage of our 20% discount with coupon code PFICM20 for any Postflopizer subscription during this period.

A lot of tournament poker players are excited about performing the postflop tournament calculations with ICM considerations. This can lead to significant changes in strategy when compared to chip EV postflop strategy and can help avoid a lot of costly mistakes near the bubble or at the final table.

As part of our commitment to provide you with the most advanced poker analysis tools, we grant you with an exclusive access to our innovative Postflopizer (with Tournament Add-On Support) functionality for one month, completely free!

Join Our Postflopizer Discord Server

Postflop analysis is complex and postflop GTO tools can be tricky to use and understand.

We'd be glad to help you with your questions at our Postflopizer discord channel. Please use the following link to join: Join Postflopizer Discord Server

Explore Postflopizer: Your Edge in Complex Situations

Postflopizer, the latest addition to our powerful ICMIZER suite, revolutionized the way you approach post-flop scenarios in tournaments, including MTTs and PKOs by adding support for these calculations in April 2024.

This advanced GTO Solver allows you to analyze and optimize your post-flop decisions, considering various factors such as stack sizes, opponent ranges, and the Independent Chip Model (ICM).

With support of various ICMIZER tournament ICM models you can find the correct postflop plays with ICM factored in in regular, knockout or progressive knockout tournaments.

How to Download and Access the Postflopizer Client

To start utilizing the Postflopizer features, you'll need to download the client.
Unlike ICMIZER that performs calculations in the cloud, Postflopizer performs calculations on your own hardware hence the affordable prices that we're offering.

Simply visit https://www.icmizer.com/postflopizer/download/ to download the latest version of the Postflopizer software for PC or Mac.

Installation is quick and easy, ensuring you can begin enhancing your post-flop strategy without delay. Once downloaded, log in using your usual ICMIZER account credentials. This seamless integration allows you to access both ICMIZER and Postflopizer from the same account and in the same downloadable tool.

How to Access This Offer Client

Starting August 13 all invited users who got access to this free test drive can use Postflopizer with Tournament Add-on and the free test drive will be active for 1 month until 20 September.

There's no need to register or enter any codes for this free test drive — simply log in and start using Postflopizer to enhance your post-flop game.

If you enjoy the test drive you can take advantage of our 20% discount with coupon code PFICM20 for any Postflopizer subscription during this period.

Types of Postflopizer Subscriptions - Cash Only or With Tournament Add-on

There are two types of Postflopizer subscriptions. You can choose either Postflopizer for cash & chip ev caclulations only or you can buy Postflopizer bundled with the tournament add-on which includes cash & chip EV and postflop tournament calculations with ICMIZER ICM models and also grants access to ICMIZER Basic functionality.

Note that if you already have an active ICMIZER Subscription, then you can purchase Postflopizer version for cash games only and still get access to tournament postflop calculations and functionality since you already have paid ICMIZER access.

Exclusive Discount for Our Valued Customers

To make this deal even sweeter, we're offering an exclusive 20% discount on all Postflopizer subscriptions. This special offer is available to everyone who wishes to continue their journey in Postflop GTO with Postflopizer after the free test drive period.

Use coupon code PFICM20 at checkout to claim your discount. Remember, this coupon is valid until September 20, so don't miss out on this opportunity to keep your competitive edge sharp at a reduced price.

Why Postflopizer GTO Solver?

With Postflopizer, you can:

• Analyze any PKO, KO or regular MTT & SNG post-flop situations using all of the advanced ICMIZER model.
• Use the powerful node locking feature to adjust your strategies based on opponent behavior and tournament phase.
• Enhance your understanding of how to maximize your equity and tournament life.
• Quickly load hand histories as text from your favorite poker room. This is a familiar functionaloty that is similar to Paste Hand History in ICMIZER
• This tool is designed to help you make better strategic decisions in complex scenarios, which can make a difference between a good finish and a tournament win.

Stay Ahead of the Competition

At ICMIZER we are dedicated to providing you with the best GTO tools to improve your poker skills. This special access to Postflopizer, coupled with an exclusive discount, is our way of saying thank you for choosing ICMIZER as your partner in poker strategy.

Log in to your account today, and start taking full advantage of Postflopizer's capabilities. Happy gaming, and may your strategic decisions lead you to many successful outcomes at the tables!

Again, see you at our Discord server: https://discord.gg/tMnShbCZtd

Contents

1. How to node lock a hand
2. The adjustment sometimes happens on another part of the game tree
3. The solver will play perfectly after the lock
4. Locking further nodes
5. The solver will rarely balance
6. EV differences
7. Conclusion

An article by Barry Carter

One of the biggest criticisms of Game Theory Optimal play is that it doesn’t reflect real life games. Most players do not play like Stephen Chidwick or Jason Koon, so trying to replicate how they play seems pointless at low stakes online or in soft live games.

GTO Solvers like Postflopizer show you much more than just how to play against a GTO opponent. They can also show you how to play when your opponent has a clearly identifiable leak like calling or folding too much. This is because of a feature called ‘node locking’.

A ‘node’ is just a decision point in a poker hand. To ‘node lock’ simply means to manually intervene and tell the solver how to act on that node.

If the solver bets a lot on a node, but you think a real life opponent would check, when you node lock you tell the solver to check instead. It will then recalculate how it should play based on this new information.

Before Postflopizer node locking was quite difficult. I personally found the process of node locking needlessly complicated using PioSolver. Thankfully I was given early access to Postflopizer and without it, I would not have been able to write my latest book Beyond GTO: Poker Exploits Simplified, which is essentially a book on node locking. Node locking really does take seconds in Postflopizer.

How to node lock a hand

To node lock a hand, you run the simulation first to get the GTO solution. It’s very important to also pay attention to the GTO solution rather than skip past it. The best way to learn is to first understand the fundamentals and then to discover what happens when your opponent deviates from the baseline strategy.

For example, in this hand we have 50BBs effective. UTG (OOP) has opened, the Button (IP) has 3-bet, and UTG has called.

The flop is 8♣7♣6♥. These are the ranges:

In GTO Solver World, OOP leads out a lot here:

This is a flop where range advantage shifts in favour of the preflop defender. OOP has all the sets, straights, some overpairs and lots of strong draws like 89s.

As such, when they check, this is what IP does:

Despite having position and a stronger preflop range, IP checks back 41% of the time, recognising that OOP has range advantage.

But what if we think that IP does not understand this concept and board texture? What if we think they are a typical player who thinks they should c-bet 100% of the time when they have raised preflop?

We click the ‘Edit Strategy’ button and this is what we see:

You simply click on the bet size you want to change the strategy to, then click on either the individual hands on the left, or the hand classes on the right, to change the strategy. So you can make AA bet 3.8 or you can make all overpairs bet 3.88, for example. Or you can select some of the prefilled mixed strategies, or make your own. When you pick, for example, a 50/50 mix of check and bet 3.8 for a hand or hand class, Postflopizer will decide how that is split up between the specific hands in that class.

Here we have made the IP player bet 3.8BBs with every hand.

We have selected ‘Unlock Previous Action’, which means that we will allow the solver to adjust the previous action if it wants. If, however, you want the previous action to remain as it was change this to ‘Lock Previous Action’. As a general rule, it is better to keep the previous action locked because it will usually reflect how the hand was played, but you will see in a moment why it is useful to do the opposite.

You then click ‘Apply & Calculate’ and re-run the hand with this new information.

The adjustment sometimes happens on another part of the game tree

The first thing to know after a node lock is that sometimes how you adjust is most significant on a separate branch of the game tree. Here is a classic example.

As we saw, the OOP player lead out 83% of the time in the GTO example. When OOP checked, IP checked back 41% of the time.

After we node-locked to make IP c-bet 100% of the time, this is OOP’s first action:

They have gone from leading 81% of the time to checking 100% of the time.

One of the reasons why OOP leads so much on an 8♣7♣6♥ flop is because if they didn’t, IP would check back a lot. However, when it is guaranteed that they will bet, OOP prefers to check and let them do it. This is often to set up a check/raise.

This highlights two important things about node locking.

First of all, the adjustment sometimes comes before the mistake is made. You will see the opposite of this too. If a player doesn’t c-bet enough, the OOP will often start to lead when they normally would check to ensure money goes into the pot.

Secondly, when a player makes an error on one part of the game tree, the solver will make an effort to force them into that part of the game tree. Here IP is making a c-betting error, so Postflopizer has forced them into the c-betting part of the tree by checking.

The solver will play perfectly after the lock

IP has made a big error by c-betting too much, and this is what OOP does when they do c-bet on the flop:

OOP exploits the error by check/raising almost everything in its range. Just for context, this is what happens in GTO Solver world when it goes check/bet:

OOP has gone from raising 23.8% of the time in GTO World, to raising 78.5% of the time when IP bets too much. This is a massive strategic adjustment. OOP will print money with both bluffs and value by doing this. This is because IP is unbalanced. They do not have enough strong hands in their range to justify betting all of them, so OOP can exploit them with the much stronger range.

This is what happens when OOP raises:

Although IP’s c-betting range was unbalanced, notice that their response to the check/raise is much more balanced. The value hands that raise are overpairs and are balanced out with mostly Tx and 9x bluffs. The calling range is balanced with AA, sets, some draws and some bluff catchers like AKo.

In real life a player who c-bets too much on this flop is likely not going to be this balanced when facing a raise. This is a very important consideration with node locking. After you force the solver to make a mistake, it will play as close to perfect as possible afterwards to try and compensate for it.

This means you have two options when node locking.

1. Takeaway broad heuristics: Here we can broadly say that the response to players who c-bet too much is to check/raise them a lot.
2. Do further node locks to get a more accurate picture: If we think we know how our opponent plays on further streets, we can node lock again to reflect that

Locking further nodes

Let’s say we think our opponent will not be as balanced facing a check/raise. In fact, we think they will shove all their top pair or better hands, call with their draws, and fold everything else. So they never bluff, essentially. We simply repeat the node locking process once again:

Now we can go back a step, this is the new OOP response when IP c-bets 100%:

In GTO Solver World, OOP raised 23.8% of the time. In our previous node lock they raised 78.5% of the time. Now, with the additional information that IP gets all their value in, but never bluffs, OOP check/raises 100% of the time.

This might surprise people that they raise more when IP has such a strong raising range. The reason we increase our check/raise frequency is because we are no longer worried about IP bluffing us off our hand. A general trend you will see when node locking is that the solver hates being raised as a bluff. It will take steps to avoid this happening. We increase our betting frequency here because we will never be folded off our hand when we are ahead, and we are also ahead of the raising range a lot of the time.

The solver will rarely balance

Let’s go back a step or two. A reminder that this is the GTO response when it goes check/bet:

In GTO World most hands mix. AA, for example, is close to 50/50 check or bet. This is so OOP can have a strong overpair in both scenarios. Most of the draws mix for the same reasons. Some outlier hands choose one action over the other. T9s is the nuts, so it calls because it is not worried about being outdrawn. The sets all raise because they are strong but vulnerable. They want to get the money in while they are likely ahead.

This is the first node locked response when IP bets too much (before we adjusted their response to the check/raise):

We have talked about how IP was unbalanced. Ironically, the response to this is also to be less balanced.

There is much less mixing in this range. AA mostly gets the money in, T9s always gets the money in, and the strong draws mostly get the money in.

When your opponent is not worried about balance, you don’t have to be either. When your opponent is exploitable, the way to make money against them is to counter-exploit.

EV differences

A final habit to get into when node locking hands is to compare the EVs in both the GTO and node locked solves. You can do this a number of ways in Postflopizer, but the easiest way is on the Results Analysis screen. This is the GTO example:

And this is after our second node lock:

In GTO World OOP makes 8.78 BBs on average. When we make IP bet too much and then not bluff when check/raised, OOP makes 11.91 BBs on average.

That is a 3.13 BB mistake, which over a large sample is a 313 BB/100 error. This is a gargantuan error over the long term, one which would see you go broke if you continued to make it. In reality, you might make this error, but your opponents would make similar errors in other spots that balance it out. But this is still an error where fixing it would hugely improve your bottom line.

You can also look at the EV of errors on the specific node they are made.

For example, in GTO World when checked to, the 3.8BB bet from IP makes 9.99 BBs on average:

This is because they are betting with a strong balanced range.

Betting 3.8 BBs in the node locked example makes just 3.09 BBs on average:

Again, the difference between GTO World and the node-locked example is 6.9 BBs, or 690 BB/100 over a large sample. It is truly haemorrhaging money.

It’s really important to compare EV between GTO and node locked examples because it puts a number on how costly some errors are. You will find that some errors are not actually that bad and others are terrible. Broadly speaking, players who are too tight tend to have the most costly errors long term which might surprise some people, because of opportunity cost.

Conclusion

The GTO solution should always be your first port of call. You cannot truly understand how to exploit an opponent until you first know the baseline strategy that you are deviating from.

However, when you have developed a reliable read on your opponent, or a whole player population, node locking will vastly improve your winrate.

You can never perfectly node lock a hand because that would require you to look at all possible bet sizes, on all possible turn and river runouts. Once you have locked for the clear-cut leaks of a player, it’s much more useful to look at the broad adjustments rather than getting into the weeds with specific details. That way you can develop heuristics that work in lots of situations. From this one hand example we might suggest the following heuristics:

• If a player doesn’t c-bet much, lead into them
• If a player c-bets too much, check/raise them a lot
• If a player doesn’t bluff raise often, you can bet against them with a much wider range
• If a player is making a clear mistake, tailor your actions to get onto the part of the game tree where they make that mistake

Beyond that, experiment with node locking. If your opponent called too much, after you have reviewed that hand, run it again for if they folded too much, or raised too much, or only raised as a bluff and called with the nuts, or vice versa. As we have stated in previous articles the way to get the most from Postflopizer is to follow your curiosity.

Contents

1. What are the shapes of the preflop ranges?
2. Back to our 874r flop
3. What does my range do?
4. What are the bluffs that go with my value?
5. What turns/rivers are good and bad for me
6. Look at the EV of key hands/actions
7. Conclusion

There is a wealth of information available at Postflopizer that can take your game to the next level. Being able to study a hand you played, with Postflopizer as your coach, will reap dividends if you make it a habit.

But if you are new to this technology, it can be overwhelming at first. Knowing what to work on and which metrics matter is a skill in itself.

In this article, I am going to show you what some of the most important questions you should be asking yourself are in a post flop hand review, then show you how you can arrive at meaningful answers using Postflopizer GTO Solver. These questions will not only be useful in the hand review, they will cultivate the same habit of asking them when you are playing a hand at the tables.

First things first, this article assumes you know the basics of how to set up a hand using Postflopizer. It also assumes that the hand ranges and bet sizes you have input reflect the actual ranges and sizes your opponents use in-game. These are the only two inputs where you have to bring something to the table, Postflopizer can do the rest. If in doubt, use GTO-approved preflop ranges and make sure you at least have a small and a large bet sizing on every street, then as you get used to studying hands try to get the ranges and bet sizes as close to accurate as possible.
These are some great starter questions to ask yourself in any hand review, which will see you become a better player if you ask them. They are roughly in the order you should ask them when reviewing a hand:

What are the shapes of the preflop ranges?

You already know this because you input the ranges yourself, but now is a time to dig deeper.

Postflopizer allows you to look at ranges side-by-side for easy comparison. The first thing to look at is the shape of each range, to determine who is likely to be ahead.

In this example we are 35BBs effective, UTG (OOP) vs UTG1 (IP) Single Raise Pot, the flop is 8♥7♠4♣ (rainbow).

Before we look at this flop specifically, let’s quickly look at the preflop ranges. OOP has a tight linear range (ie. all the best hands). Linear ranges tend to dominate most flops, especially Ace high and paired flops. They tend to bet often, usually for a small sizing.

IP has a tight condensed range (mostly medium-strength hands). Condensed ranges usually perform well on Broadway or Middle-card centric flops, but often have to play cautiously.

Other types of preflop ranges

This is unrelated to the hand we are reviewing but the other two range types are capped ranges, which look like this:

Capped ranges tend to have medium strength and weak hands, but no strong hands in them. They tend to perform well on low-connected flops but otherwise typically play a passive bluff-catching style.

There are also polarised ranges:

Polarised ranges

Polarised ranges tend to have very strong hands and weak hands as bluffs, with nothing in the middle. Polarised ranges tend to play aggressively and bet for larger sizes.

Back to our 874r flop

Back to our 874r flop, we would expect OOP to have an advantage because they have more overpairs. We can answer whether this is the case by looking at the equities of both ranges:

This is one of the most important outputs in Postflopizer. We can see that OOP has a slight overall advantage of 51.1%. However, it’s more useful to look at where that advantage lies by looking at the colour coding on both grids. Green means strong, yellow means OK, and Orange means weak hands. We can see a strong green diagonal line on OOP’s grid, signalling most of their equity is coming from pocket pairs, both the Sets and the Overpairs. The green for IP is mostly just the Sets.

Looking between the two grids we can see how big a percentage of the overall range each hand class is. Sets are 10.2% of the IP range, they are 3.9% of OOP’s range. Overpairs are 13.9% of OOP’s range, they are 8.7% of IP’s range.

It’s also useful to look at the EV’s of both players:

IP has an EV of 3.5BBs while OOP has an EV of 2.6BBs. Despite having a slight equity advantage, OOP makes less on average in this hand. This is because, as their name suggests, OOP is out of position. The equities are close, but OOP will be at an informational disadvantage throughout the hand.

We know that OOP has a stronger range with more overpairs, but it is close, and the IP player’s positional advantage counts for a lot.

What does my range do?

It’s understandable that you would want to see what your hand does from the session you just played, but a more useful question is to ask what your whole range does.

Let’s say in real life, you were the IP player and you had A♣Q♦. Your opponent checked to you on the flop and you checked back. This is what Postflopizer does in that spot:

As you can see, your hand checks back most of the time. But what does the range do? Well, most of the time it bets.

Ask yourself why your range does this.

One answer might be that with relatively close ranges, a check from OOP is a sign of weakness that can be capitalised on. This is a flop that they are unlikely to have hit and they will have to fold a lot. Add to that the fact that you have position, meaning you can put them in a tough spot on the turn and/or river if they continue.

Your range wants to bet, and this is the important takeaway here, rather than what your hand did. So while you were right to check back, be prepared to bet a lot when a similar scenario comes up.

What are the outlier hands?

We have looked at what the range wants to do, now is the time to look at individual hands. This question is a really important one. In fact, this is perhaps the question where you can learn the most from solvers. Ask yourself which hands deviate from the range strategy, and why?

Looking at the range again:

The range mixes and mostly bets. A hand like ATs closely mirrors what the range wants to do, betting around 70% of the time and checking the rest.

The outlier hands here are 88, 77 and 44, all of which bet 100% of the time. This is for obvious reasons, they are Sets and want to get value.

AKo, AQo and KQs are also outliers in that they bet rarely. This is more of a head-scratcher. One interpretation might be that they are likely ahead of the checking range, but if they bet, they will fold out all the hands they beat and only get called by better hands.

We can test this assumption by looking at the response to the small bet:

When you bet, the hands that fold are all Kx and the worst Ax. Nothing better folds, so betting with AQ+ here doesn’t work as a bluff. Some worse hands call, but they are all hands that have some backdoor equity. KTs and KJs for example can hit runner-runner straights as well as spiking a pair.

When IP bets, OOP raises a lot of worse hands as bluffs. They raise KQs-KJs as well as worse Ax quite often. We would hate to have to fold AQ to a bluffing KQs.

So the reason we check back with AKo, AQo and KQs most of the time is because they don’t make better hands fold, few worse hands call, but crucially they make worse hands bluff raise, forcing us to fold.

As you can see, when you ask yourself ‘What are the outlier hands, and why?’ you can arrive at some very useful lessons learned. Get into the habit of doing it.

What are the bluffs that go with my value?

A well-constructed GTO range will have the right proportion of bluffs and value. Value bet too much and your bluffs won’t get folds. Don’t bluff enough and your value bets won’t get paid.

A very useful exercise is to look at which hands the solver chooses to bluff, to go along with the value bets. Don’t get too bogged down in the frequencies of bluffs-to-value just yet, let’s just look at the hands chosen to bluff.

Going back to the OOP response to a small bet, these are the check/raises:

The Sets raise about half the time and call about half the time. Two pair always raises and overpairs raise most of the time. The one pair hands mix their actions a lot. This probably all makes sense.

What are the bluffs here?

Ace high bluffs a lot. It can spike an Ace if called and will likely be ahead. However, the most common Ace bluff is A6s and A5o, because these two hands have gutshots to go with their overcard. AK bluffs a lot because the K kicker is also useful.

Kx raises, with KJs bluffing more than KQs, KTs bluffing more than KJs, and K9s bluffing more than KTs. This is mainly because the lower the kicker, the more likely it is they can hit a runner-runner straight.

The best draw is T9s because it has an open-ended straight draw, but it only bluffs half the time. A lot of players would assume we should always bluff our best draw, but from a GTO perspective, we would hate to have to fold it to a raise. We also want to have ‘runout coverage’ ie. we want it to be possible to have turned a straight when we call and also when we raise the flop. More on that in a moment.

Asking yourself which bluffs go along with the value is a very useful exercise and will help you decide on your bluffs in the moment when you are at the table.

What turns/rivers are good and bad for me?

A Postflopizer tool not to be ignored is the ‘Turn Runouts’ and ‘River Runouts’ buttons. Get into the habit of looking at this before you put out the actual Turn or River card that occurred in-game.

You get a wealth of information for every possible Turn/River card. You get the equity, EV and next actions for each. Let’s assume IP called the check/raise. These are the stats and next actions for OOP:

Here we can see that the best Turn cards for OOP are 8s and 7s, which are all worth 52.9% equity or better and would commonly lead OOP to bet (the bar underneath the card previews the betting and checking frequencies).

The worst cards for OOP are Jacks, which are worth 44.7% equity or worse (meaning they are worth 54.3% equity or better for IP) and would always lead OOP to check.

This is because OOP had 88, 77 and 87 in their check/raising range. They also had all the overpairs that will typically be strong on a paired board, because a paired turn card reduces the chance of a straight happening and increases their chance of getting a full house by the river.

The Jack is better for IP, as we mentioned from the outset they have a higher proportion of Broadway hands like KJ and QJ. T9s for a straight is also a higher proportion of their range than it is for OOP. Tx and 9x are also a higher proportion of their range, giving them a gutshot they can bluff with.

Looking at the Turn and River Runouts helps you understand the shape of each range better and crucially is very useful for when you play. Being able to tell yourself the good and bad Turn/River cards in-game before they are dealt will help you adjust in the moment at the tables, rather than being flummoxed about what to do when a surprise turn card hits.

Look at the EV of key hands/actions

One final habit to implement is to pay attention to the EV (Expected Value) of the trickier decisions. Let’s go back to the flop when OOP was facing a bet and pondering whether to Check/Raise.

If you select EV and then hover over each hand, it will show the profitability of each action. For example AA:

AA makes us 6.52BBs as a raise and 6.54BBs as a call. It makes slightly more as a call than a raise, perhaps because it crushes a lot of IP’s value and we would expect IP to bet a lot on the turn. However, the EV is close between the two which is why it mixes.

Let’s look at 87s:

87s, which is top two pair, makes 9.46BBs on average as a raise and 9.19BBs as a call. It is clearly more profitable as a raise, which anyone who has played poker will understand, because top two pair shrinks in value by the river, so better to get the money in now. This is why 87s is a pure raise. The 0.27BBs difference might not seem much, but over the long-term calling, instead of raising, with it is a 27BB/100 error, which is a huge mistake.

Don’t get bogged down in looking at the EV of every hand and every line, but certainly do it for the big hands, the close hands and the tricky hands. What may seem like a small difference between two strategies can be an overwhelming difference over the long term.

Conclusion

There are so many more important questions to ask during a hand review, but what we have just looked at will really bring you up to speed with what a powerful GTO Solver tool like Postflopizer is capable of. We have only just scratched the surface of what else you can learn from it, so once you have these basics down, follow your curiosity.