Articles by Coaches
- Why the solver widens for antes — and tightens the button for straddlesBrad Wilson
- Seven NLHE reflexes you have to unlearn in Standup NLHUri Peleg
- The cliff, the texture flip, and what the solver won't tell usNick Petrangelo
- Your NLHE c-bet sizes are wrong in Standup — here's where and whyDaniel Dvoress
Articles by Growth Partners
- QuintAI Graded My Dumbest Hands. It's Not What You Think.Jean-Robert Bellande
- Phil Ivey × QuintAI: revisiting his most legendary handsPhil Ivey
- Re-testing Easy Game's core findings: intuition vs QuintAIAndrew Seidman
- 5 Questions from Patrik Antonius's Public Record — Answered by the SolverPatrik Antonius
- Seven Hands from Patrik's Modern Cash Era: A Solver RetrospectivePatrik Antonius
- The solver says mix. You can't. Now what?Xuan Liu
- Was the 2018 WSOP Main Event win luck or skill? John Cynn and QuintAI revisit the 199-hand marathonJohn Cynn
- Late Night at HCL — Exploit Reads Over Solver DefaultsJasper Ma
- Four MTT spots, four grinder instincts, the solver weighs inTurbo Nguyen
Flagship research books
- Book 1: The 8 Pillars of Poker Strategyv1.7.0
- Book 2: Squid Classicv1.8.0
- Book 3: Cash Format Transitionsv1.8.0
- Book 4: Opponent Modeling & Exploitationv0.1.0
- Book 5: PLO4 — Strategy Divergencev2.3.0
- Book 5: PLO4 — Strategy from Zerov2.3.0
- Book 5: NLHE → PLO Heuristic Migrationv2.3.0
- Book 6: MTT — Strategy Divergencev2.0.0
Articles by Coaches
Deeper technical pieces focused on the mechanics of learning. Our coaches run coaching businesses; their articles are built to teach.
Work in progress
Pre-release. Password required — reach out for access.
Why the solver widens for antes — and tightens the button for straddles
Antes and straddles both put chips in the pot before the hand. The solver treats them very differently. Antes widen every position uniformly. Straddles widen UTG, MP, and CO modestly — but narrow the button by 14.4 percentage points. The asymmetry reshapes every seat's preflop strategy; the article works through the mechanism and the position-by-position playbook.
Seven NLHE reflexes you have to unlearn in Standup NLH
Squid Classic is 6-max No-Limit Hold'em with one rule bolted on — the last player holding no squid at game end pays the penalty. That single change layers a continuous equity term on top of chip EV, and a double-digit list of NLHE habits start to leak in specific, solver-measurable ways. Uri Peleg — Squid Classic specialist — walks through seven of those reflexes, with the solver numbers that quantify the flip and the replacement rules you can take to the table.
The cliff, the texture flip, and what the solver won't tell us
Squid Classic's hero-last state rewrites poker twice. Preflop it draws a raise-or-limp cliff — 88 raises three-quarters of the time where NLHE raises 0.2%; adjacent hands behave oppositely. Postflop it flips the texture order — K94ss monotone goes from the lowest c-bet frequency in the NLHE dataset to one of the highest, a +54.7pp swing. Nick Petrangelo walks three hands across both layers, shows where the fold-equity math drives the shift, and names the API gap that keeps per-combo postflop questions open for the solver team. Plot-twist with an honest research-notes footer.
Your NLHE c-bet sizes are wrong in Standup — here's where and why
Every NLHE cash reg has the same flop c-bet sizing tree in their head — 33% / 50% / 75% / pot. Squid Classic's forward-looking penalty layer breaks three of the four sizings across three specific textures. Daniel Dvoress — GTO Lab co-founder, cash-game specialist — walks through dry A-high, mid-connected rainbow (the 654/765/876 exception), and paired low, shows the solver's replacement sizing per texture, and distills a three-rule heuristic for the flop-sizing decision in Squid.
Articles by Growth Partners
Different formats, different voices. Built to pull readers in — solver-verified, but the priority is reach and discovery.
QuintAI Graded My Dumbest Hands. It's Not What You Think.
JRB handed over 13 of his most-discussed televised hands for solver grading. Two are real fold mistakes (QQ to Salomon, AK to Persson — ~$137K of misjudged EV). One is a correct call unwound by verbal pressure (Robl's flush-rep). One is the Adelstein top-two call that every commentator said was a mistake — and the solver says was right. The leak isn't misread opponents; it's conviction under pressure.
Phil Ivey × QuintAI: revisiting his most legendary hands
The most publicly-discussed Ivey hands in televised poker — from the Moneymaker cooler at the 2003 WSOP Main Event through the Paul Jackson bluff war at Monte Carlo '05, the $676K Dwan tank-fold on High Stakes Poker, and the Guinness-record $1.1M MDCG pot — put through the QuintAce solver. The public memory of Ivey is mostly mystique; the solver quantifies it, one decision at a time.
Re-testing Easy Game's core findings: intuition vs QuintAI
Good poker intuition points at the right target. The solver tells you whether the target actually exists, how close you were to the coordinates, and what to do when you get there. We run 8 of Andrew Seidman's load-bearing claims from *Easy Game* through the QuintAce solver and grade each one — intuition on the money, intuition pointed at the right target but wrong coordinates, or intuition pointed at a ghost. Seidman responds inline to each verdict.
5 Questions from Patrik Antonius's Public Record — Answered by the Solver
QuintAce curated five questions from Patrik Antonius's public analytical record — spots he's remarked on in interviews and columns, each a question he's plausibly asked himself. We ran the solver on each and wrote up what came back. Patrik reviews the draft and reacts in v2. The piece is a map of what's still unsettled at the top of the game — sourced from the words of one of the people who plays it.
Work in progress
Pre-release. Password required — reach out for access.
Seven Hands from Patrik's Modern Cash Era: A Solver Retrospective
Patrik Antonius played elite televised NLHE cash through the entire solver era. HSP, Triton, Cash of the Titans, the $1.978M No Gamble No Future pot, and the Andy Ni bluff — seven hands that span 2014-2024. QuintAce's solver revisits each one. The read-based template he built pre-solver still works; the solver retrospectively confirms his instincts on most decisions and surfaces lines that didn't exist when the hands were played.
The solver says mix. You can't. Now what?
Two minds, two methods, one spot. Xuan Liu brings a strategic claim she wants to pressure-test. QuintAce's solver runs it. Xuan responds to the verdict. Together we close with what a pro actually does in-game given both outputs. This is the inaugural entry in a running column — debate format, not grading.
Was the 2018 WSOP Main Event win luck or skill? John Cynn and QuintAI revisit the 199-hand marathon
John Cynn outlasted Tony Miles over 199 heads-up hands to win the 2018 WSOP Main Event. QuintAce's solver looks back at three turning-point decisions — his Day 8 snap-call with pocket Kings, the tank-fold against Miles' 7-5 bluff on a paired board, and the final hand that ended the tournament. The finding: two of three are solver-approved snap decisions. The middle one — the famous tank-fold — is the hand the solver says to call. What the article is really about is what happens next.
Late Night at HCL — Exploit Reads Over Solver Defaults
Jasper Ma plays 100% of his hands and wins. The solver doesn't teach you how — because the solver isn't playing HCL. This is the pilot exploit-files piece: the solver gives us the GTO baseline, Jasper's moves give us the deviation, and the article documents why the deviation beats the specific target. Two hands (the $535K river call vs Gaolito; the 5-way limp with 98o against a live-cash pool) plus the population frame of Jasper's 91-100% VPIP sessions.
Four MTT spots, four grinder instincts, the solver weighs in
305 cashes is a lot of MTT hands. A live grinder develops reflexes, and the reflexes work — you don't cash 305 times without them. But every reflex has a stack-depth where it starts to leak. Four common MTT spots — 50bb, 30bb, 20bb, 12bb — each with a standard grinder instinct. The Quintace solver weighs in on each. The pattern across the four: the grinder's preferred direction (pot-control at one depth, force-action at another) is systematically the opposite of what the solver picks. The tax per spot is small; over 305 cashes it compounds.
Flagship research books
Long-form solver-verified poker strategy research, co-authored with coaches. Every claim traces to a query. Each article above derives from one of these.
Squid Classic
the first strategy manual
QuintAce's proprietary poker variant where each pot carries a game-end win token and whoever finishes without one pays a penalty. Nobody else has published strategy research on it. Ten solver-verified mechanisms, grounded in the literal game rules. v1.8.0 complete rebuild with methodology refresh.
Cash Format Transitions
how your strategy shifts when the format changes
How ante structure, table size, stack depth, rake, and compound transitions reshape GTO strategy. Five chapters, each grounded in solver-verified mechanisms. All chapters published.
Work in progress
Pre-release. Password required — reach out for access.
The 8 Pillars of Poker Strategy
and what our solver says about each
51 foundational poker theories from modern GTO literature, tested against our solver at scale. Eight pillars covering equity and ranges, frequencies and balance, position, sizing, board texture, multi-street strategy, advanced concepts, and 3-bet pot dynamics. All theories carry source links and confidence badges.
Opponent Modeling & Exploitation
what real opponents do, and how to adjust
Most poker research asks what the solver does. This book asks what real opponents do, how far that is from GTO, and what the optimal counter-strategy is. Starting with bots — the most documented player type in our pool. 12 ranked behavioral signatures, the 'fake nit' paradox, and the sizing polarity inversion that breaks standard MDA logic. **Currently WIP** — awaiting additional research-team data; structure stable, content expansion pending.
PLO4 — Strategy Divergence
where PLO strategy diverges from Cash NLHE
How the trained PLO4 model plays Pot-Limit Omaha versus the Cash NLHE baseline. Nine mechanisms (M1-M9), all T1, covering paired-board cbet suppression, limp-depth inversion, connected-board cbet elevation, wider opens, wider BB defense, turn probe elevation, depth-dependent defense against EP openers, river bet direction reversal after BB turn probes, and BB 3-bet behaviour against LP openers. ~179 solver queries across 9 iterative batches; STOP declared.
PLO4 — Strategy from Zero
how the solver plays PLO from the ground up
Same solver research as our Strategy Divergence book (5b), reframed for readers learning PLO as a standalone game. No NLHE references. Nine mechanisms explained from PLO-native reasoning.
NLHE → PLO Heuristic Migration
which NLHE habits work in PLO and which break
One-page migration cheat sheet. Every significant NLHE heuristic → PLO correction with representative solver data. Designed for competent NLHE players who just sat down at a PLO table.
MTT — Strategy Divergence
how tournament play diverges from cash
How the trained MTT model plays multi-table tournaments versus Cash NLHE, classified across all 8 Cash pillars (A–H) plus Pillar M (MTT-native). 62 theory entries: 23 TRANSFER CLEANLY, 8 AMPLIFY, 1 TEXTURE-SPLIT/REVERSE, 5 MTT-SPECIFIC MODIFICATION (G4 ICM expanded), 15 UNTESTED (Pillar F multi-street, Pillar H 3-bet pots, shallow-D), 10 Pillar M natives (bounty pricing, stage binning, M-ratio, push-fold crossover, SB limping, chip utility, early-ICM engagement). 8 solver-verified mechanisms (M1–M8) all T1 at single-checkpoint. 914 solver queries (497 MTT + 417 Cash); B1 trust gate 40/55 PASS with identical Cash fail set (E4 Cash→MTT PASS). **Currently WIP** — blocked on KI-10 (stage-collapse data-emission bug, gameplay-ai owned), M4 downgrade-vs-audit decision, and M-Probe merge resolution (affects book-2 primarily but ripples here).