Orpen Kisacikoglu has spent years studying poker at the highest level. He’s played the biggest tournaments in the world, built a coaching relationship with Ben Heath that lasted years before he could study independently, and now backs some of the best players in the game. He’s also watched a pattern repeat across the poker world that should bother anyone who takes improvement seriously.
A player loses a pot, wants to know if their river call was right, opens a solver, clicks through to the river node, sees that their combo was a call or a fold, and closes the tab. Study session complete.
Except nothing was studied.
Think about the last time you ran a hand through a solver. You had a specific spot in mind, a river decision that stung. You loaded the hand, set up the ranges, and clicked through the streets to get to the node you cared about. How much time did you spend on the flop texture? How do the ranges interact on that board? What did the turn card change about the equity distribution?
Probably close to zero. You were headed for the answer, and everything between the preflop setup and the river node was just navigation.
Orpen put it bluntly: “All the previous six clicks where you get to the river node on the software, you haven’t done any thinking.” You look at the final page, see that your combo was fine or marginal, and move on. The spot that could have taught you something about range construction, about why certain sizings exist on earlier streets, gets skipped because you already had a destination in mind.
The problem goes deeper than wasted time. Every hand in a poker tournament is connected. A sizing decision on the flop shapes the turn, which shapes the river. When you skip straight to the river in your solver, you’re looking at the endpoint of a chain reaction you never examined. The answer at the river might even be correct. But the mistakes that brought you there, the ones the solver could have shown you if you’d slowed down on the flop and turn, stay invisible.
Why Seeing a Solver Isn’t the Same as Reading It
Orpen’s own learning path makes this point sharply. When Ben Heath first started coaching him, Orpen was already playing high-stakes tournaments. He had the money to access every tool, every resource. But when he sat down with solver output, he couldn’t make sense of what he was looking at.
“It felt exactly like learning a new language,” he said. He could see the colours, the combos, the frequencies, but he couldn’t connect any of it to decisions at the table. He needed Ben to sit with him multiple times a week for years, explaining why certain frequencies existed, why a solver was choosing one sizing over another. It took him through Corona and beyond before he felt confident studying alone.
That timeline is worth sitting with. A player competing at the highest stakes, with unlimited access to coaching and tools, needed years of guided study before solver output became legible on its own. And he was getting coached by one of the best in the world.
If you’re loading a solver after your session and clicking around for twenty minutes, you’re probably overestimating what’s happening. The information is there. Your ability to decode it is the bottleneck, and most players never confront that honestly.
You might not need a Ben Heath on speed dial. But recognising where you actually are in the process matters. Orpen described looking at Pio sims like “looking at a Chinese language.” He didn’t even have tendencies of his own to compare against what the solver was suggesting. He’d been doing different things every session, random things, as he put it.
Most players aren’t quite that far behind. If you’ve played a few thousand hands online, you have some instinct for how spots develop. But there’s a version of the same problem at every level: you can see the data without understanding the relationships between the data points. When that’s the case, solver time gives you exposure without requiring you to build any framework for using it. If the gap between what you study and what you execute at the table keeps growing, the problem isn’t the tool.
Solvers Killed the Conversations That Taught You
Orpen made a claim that deserves more attention: “Maybe solvers made some people worse players because they stopped talking to their friends about the hands.”
Before solvers were everywhere, a hand review meant sitting with someone and arguing about it. You’d describe the spot, they’d push back on your range assumptions, and you’d disagree about the opponent’s tendencies. Somewhere in that friction, the actual learning happened. The discussion forced you to articulate your reasoning. It exposed gaps in your logic because another person was actively probing them.
Solvers offer a cleaner answer. But when you check a solver, you get confirmation or correction. Your combo was good, or it wasn’t. What you don’t get is the why behind the why. Why does the solver want that sizing? What changes if the opponent deviates? How does this spot connect to the three other spots you played badly tonight?
Those questions only surface when someone else is in the room asking them. Or when you’re forced to explain your thinking out loud and realise halfway through that you don’t actually know what you’re talking about. The convenience of solvers has quietly eroded one of the most effective learning methods in poker: messy, argumentative, ego-bruising conversation with people who think differently than you.
Think about what happens when you describe a hand to a friend who plays a different style. They question your open from the cutoff. They think the flop check-raise was too small. They have a completely different read on the opponent. Suddenly you’re defending choices you made on autopilot, and you realise some of those choices were based on assumptions you’d never tested.
That friction is uncomfortable. It’s also what produces understanding that holds up when pressure is real and the stakes matter. Rote answers from a solver don’t survive stress. Understanding you’ve argued for and rebuilt does.
What Should You Actually Do With a Solver?
The solver itself isn’t the problem. The workflow around it is.
Before you open the solver, write down what you think the answer is. Your actual reasoning. What range do you think the opponent has here? What sizing do you expect the solver to prefer, and why? This one step forces you to engage with the spot before you see the answer, and it gives you something to compare against. When the solver disagrees with your prediction, you’ve found the gap. That’s where the learning lives.
Spend more time on the streets you normally skip. The flop and turn are where range dynamics develop. They’re the foundation for why the river decision works out the way it does. If you jump to the river, you’re studying the conclusion without reading the argument.
Talk about hands with someone before checking the solver. If you don’t have a study partner, explain the hand to yourself out loud. Verbalising your reasoning forces a different kind of processing than silently clicking through nodes. You’ll catch assumptions you didn’t know you were making.
And when you do check the solver, stay past the answer. Look at the other combos in your range. Look at what the solver does with hands just above and below the threshold. The solver isn’t a calculator that gives you one answer. It’s a model of how an entire range is supposed to behave. The individual combo is the least interesting part.
Orpen spends at least 65% of his study time on final table scenarios, situations that come up less often but carry enormous weight when they do. The number of players who make chip EV mistakes is smaller than the number who butcher ICM spots. The edge is bigger where the study is deeper. The same principle applies to your solver work. You’ll extract more from one hand studied with genuine curiosity, exploring the range dynamics, questioning the sizings, understanding why each street plays the way it does, than from ten hands where you clicked to the river to check if your call was fine.
Pick one hand from your last session. Write your reasoning before you open anything. Then study it from the front to the back. Talk to someone about it if you can.
That’s one hand. Done properly.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why isn’t my solver study making me better at poker?
You’re probably clicking straight to the river node to check if your call was right, then closing the tab. Orpen Kisacikoglu says the six clicks between preflop setup and the river node are where the real learning lives. Skipping the flop and turn means you’re looking at the endpoint of a chain reaction you never examined.
How long does it take to learn how to use a poker solver?
Longer than most people admit. Orpen needed years of guided study with coach Ben Heath before solver output became legible on its own. He describes looking at Pio Sims like “looking at a Chinese language” early on. If you’re clicking around for twenty minutes after a session, you’re likely overestimating what’s being absorbed.
Did solvers make some poker players worse?
Orpen argues they did, because solvers replaced the messy, argumentative hand-review conversations that produced deep learning. Before solvers, you had to articulate your reasoning and defend it. Someone would probe the gaps in your logic. Solvers offer cleaner answers but skip the “why behind the why” that builds understanding under pressure.
What is the best way to study a poker hand?
Write down what you think the answer is before opening the solver. This forces you to engage with the spot before seeing the output. When the solver disagrees with your prediction, you’ve found the gap where learning lives. Then spend time on the flop and turn dynamics, not just the river conclusion.
How should I use poker study groups effectively?
Talk about hands with someone before checking the solver. The friction of disagreement is uncomfortable, but it produces learning that transfers to the table. Rote answers from a solver don’t survive pressure. Understanding you’ve argued for, taken apart, and rebuilt holds up when real money is on the line.
