My First Solver
A Step-by-Step Guide to Modern Poker Study
Learn the fundamentals of tournament poker study, understand how modern study tools work, and build the skills to keep improving on your own.
Why we made My First Solver
Studying Poker Shouldn’t Feel This Hard
Getting better at poker can be hard. You’ve probably heard that solvers are one of the best tools for improving your game, but opening one for the first time can be overwhelming.
We’ve been there. There’s a lot to take in when everything is new, and explanations can leave you with more questions than answers. We know how helpful it is to have someone slow down, explain things clearly, and help you find your footing.
That’s why we created My First Solver. We’ll help you understand what you’re looking at, identify the takeaways that matter, and build a repeatable process for studying on your own. The goal isn’t to teach you how to memorize solver outputs. It’s to give you the building blocks you need to understand them and use them to improve your game long after the course is over.
Getting better at poker can be hard. You’ve probably heard that solvers help, but opening one for the first time can be overwhelming.
We’ve been there. There’s a lot to take in when everything is new, and explanations can leave you with more questions than answers. It helps to have someone slow down and help you find your footing.
That’s why we created My First Solver. We’ll help you understand what you’re looking at, identify the takeaways that matter, and build a repeatable process for studying on your own: the building blocks to keep improving long after the course is over.
How it works
Guiding You to Better Study
Matt walks you through Octopi’s tools by using practical examples, explaining what you’re looking at and what the takeaways are. Along the way, you’ll learn how to structure focused study sessions and put into practice what you’ve learned. Every lesson gives you an additional building block for improving your tournament game.
The solution
A Path You Can Follow
Instead of giving you access to solver tools and leaving you to figure things out, this course walks you through everything you need to know to study individual hands, from the flop to the river. Every lesson is practical and allows you to test your knowledge of the material. You’ll watch Matt work through a real spot in the platform, with every concept and decision explained in plain terms. And every module ends with a quiz as well as drills to help you cement your knowledge. This entire process is built for tournament players who are new to solver study, or who have tried to study like this before and given up.
Instead of giving you solver tools and leaving you to figure things out, this course walks you through studying a hand from the flop to the river. Every lesson is practical: you watch Matt work through a real spot in the platform, with each decision explained in plain terms, and every module ends with a quiz and drills to cement it. It’s built for tournament players who are new to solver study, or who have tried before and given up.
The path
What You’ll Learn
![An open book with the Octopi mark]()
How to get more from
your poker studyMatt helps you build the skills needed to sit down with a clear purpose, use the tools effectively, and know what to work on next.![A range chart with a tool over it]()
How to use tools
with confidenceLearn how to navigate Octopi, understand what you’re looking at, and use each tool with confidence.![A trail map with a route marked]()
What to focus
your study onLearn which spots are worth studying, what to take away from them, and how to reinforce those lessons through focused practice.![Chips and a card inside a repeat loop]()
How to build a
consistent routineBring it all together into a repeatable study process, so each session builds on the last and you can keep progressing after the course.
How to get more from 
How to use tools 
What to focus 
How to build a What you get
Everything You Need to Get Started
- LearnSix hours of video · Lesson notes · Platform walkthroughs
- PracticeQuizzes · GTO Trainer drills
- ConnectOctopi Discord community
Six hours of video content
Matt Hunt teaches every lesson, and every lesson is filmed on the Octopi platform, so what you watch is exactly what you’ll use afterward. The sample video here shows Matt explaining why we bluff, using a solver output to demonstrate. The rest of the course follows a similar format: one decision at a time, with the reasoning made visible before you move on to the next one.
47 lessons across seven modules, six hours in total. Each one builds on the last, so by the final module you’re reading solver output on your own and know what to do with it.
Quizzes
Every module ends with a quiz inside the Academy lesson itself, so you can make sure you understand what you just watched before moving on. The questions cover the same spots the lesson covered, and a wrong answer points you straight back to the lesson to revisit.
These quizzes make sure you’re not just nodding along to the video but can actually apply the reasoning yourself — which is the part that shows up at the table.
GTO Trainer drills
Each lesson links to drills that are pre-built to cover that material in the GTO Trainer, so there’s nothing to set up. Open the drill, play the spots the lesson just covered, and see your decisions scored against the solver as you go, in ChipEV or ICM mode.
Because the drills match up perfectly with the lesson content, the practice reinforces what you just learned rather than something adjacent to it. Come back to the ones where you struggle the most, and by the end of the course you’ll have a set of drills built around your own weak spots that you can keep running long after the videos are done.
Lesson notes
Every lesson comes with its own notes: the key points, the spots covered, and the resources it refers to, laid out so you can review a lesson in a couple of minutes without rewatching it, or check a detail while you are working through a drill.
Transcripts come in English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese, so you can watch Matt in English and read along in your own language.
Octopi Discord access
The Octopi Discord is where the community studies together. Ask a question about a lesson, post a hand you’re unsure about, or compare notes with other players working on their game, and get answers from people who use the same tools you do.
It’s also the easiest place to find a study partner, and it’s open to you for as long as you’re on Octopi, not just while you work through the course.
Real Octopi platform walkthroughs
Alongside the theory, the course walks you through the whole Octopi platform — the sims, the GTO Trainer, the Vault, the Academy, and Leak Analytics — and how each one fits into a study session. Nothing is shown in the abstract; every tool appears at the point in the course where you need it.
By the end you’ll know where everything lives, what to open first when you sit down to study, and how to turn a hand you played last night into a drill you can run this week.
What players say
What Matt’s Students Say
“Matt’s verbal style is great. I’ve used a LOT of other courses and products … and very few, if any, achieve the fusion of friendly lessons and intuitive foundations + tool use as synergistically as OP has.”
“Overall I’m very impressed. The course is structured & sequenced well. The flow makes it easy to follow, concepts are broken down well with examples.”
“It’s much more than a “how to use Octopi” guide: it’s a full poker fundamentals course. It’s hands-on, easy to understand, and offers a very good mix of video material and hands-on exercises.”
“They won’t just learn how to use a solver, they’ll come away with a much better understanding of poker theory itself.”
“Whether it’s solver work or hand history analysis, Matt always finds a way to make the learning feel structured and accessible. His support through Discord and private coaching has been consistent and impactful.”
“Matt’s ability to clearly explain complex or unfamiliar topics makes even the most advanced concepts easy to understand and apply. I highly recommend him to anyone serious about elevating their poker game.”
“Matt focuses on more than just solver outputs — he teaches a clear, structured way of thinking about poker. His guidance on range construction, stack-size adjustments, and other poker theory concepts has helped me feel more confident and deliberate in my decisions.”
“Matt’s sharp, analytical approach to poker makes learning feel like a fun puzzle to solve. He’s an expert at using solver tools to break down complex spots and fine-tune strategy.”
“Thank you for a fantastic course, Matt. You do a great job answering questions and making players feel welcome.”
“Matt’s depth of understanding has helped me apply concepts more confidently and adapt when similar spots come up.”
“I’m a novice so it helped me, but I think it will help poker play and thinking for players at any level.”
“I am a rec and I have a full-time job and an 8-year-old kid. Study/practice is the only way to get better at anything.”
What are the tools
An Introduction to Octopi
The Sims
High-precision preflop ranges for MTTs and heads-up in a fast, intuitive viewer, with a Compare Range tool that shows how strategies shift between positions, stack depths, and tournament stages.
Behind that sits a large, constantly growing library of postflop sims, plus tools you won’t find in a classic solver: the visual Game Tree, Range Map, Aggregate Reports, Runouts, and a side-by-side range explorer.
The Trainer
The most intuitive GTO Trainer on the market. Drill the exact preflop and postflop spots from each lesson in ChipEV or ICM mode, on desktop or mobile, and build custom drills for any board texture or hand class that matters to your game. Every decision is scored against the solver, so you see the EV a mistake cost and where it came from, and Leak Analytics breaks your results down spot by spot so you know what to work on next.
The Vault
Over 18,000 hands from Triton, PokerGO, the WSOP, and more. Study more than 2,000 preflop and postflop ICM sims, or replay these spots yourself with the GTO Trainer to see how your play would differ from pros like Stephen Chidwick. Browse by event, player, or hand, with stacks, payouts, and the full stack map alongside each hand, so you see the pressure the players were under, not just the cards.
What’s inside
Full Lesson Outline
Module 01 · 3 lessons
Orientation
Module 02 · 10 lessons
Preflop Fundamentals
Module 03 · 9 lessons
Postflop: The Flop
Module 04 · 7 lessons
Postflop: The Turn
Module 05 · 7 lessons
Postflop: The River
Module 06 · 9 lessons
Harnessing the Full Range of Octopi Tools
Module 07 · 2 lessons
Your Study Process Moving Forward
My First Solver
$50
One-time purchase
Buy by Oct 15 and enter the draw for 1 month of Champions coaching
- Six hours of video content
- Quizzes & drills throughout
- Detailed notes of every lesson
Included for free with the $90 for 90 days package and with all annual plans
Includes 15 days of free Professional access
Still have questions
Frequently Asked Questions
Answer
Buy My First Solver during the first two weeks of launch, October 1st to 15th, and you’ll be entered into a random draw to win one of three 1-month passes to Champions, our new personal coaching program.
Champions pairs you with your own Octopi coach: a private group where you can share any hand from your Octopi history, along with online sessions and trainer sessions; coaching built around your Leak Analytics and study data, with drills assigned to fix what your coach finds; and answers through chat inside Octopi, whenever a question comes up.
My First Solver is your step-by-step guide to getting started with solver study tools. We’ll take you from looking at a sim for the first time to building a study plan designed to improve the weakest areas of your game. You’ll learn to use the tools built into the Octopi platform - the GTO Trainer, the Vault, the Sims Library - to accelerate your learning.
No. This course is built for players with limited or no solver experience. Whether you’re opening poker software for the first time, or you’ve tried before and didn’t get much out of it, this course is for you.
The course costs $50 but new users can get it for free with the $90 for 90 days package and annual subscribers get access to the course for free. Everyone else can buy it outright, and it includes 15 days of free Professional access.
The course contains 6 hours of video content but counting the time you spend on quizzes and drills, the course is likely to take you between 10 and 20 hours to complete. You’ll be learning straight from the first minutes into the course though and by the end, you’ll be able to follow a full six-week study plan.
The course contains video lessons, quizzes, drills, and transcripts of the material. On top of that, you’ll get access to the GTO Trainer, all of the other Octopi platform tools, and the Octopi community.
All courses and course material can be found in the “Academy” tab of Octopi Poker.
Whenever you run into any spots you don’t understand or have questions about the course, you can ask our pros and staff in our Discord server or via email.
The course is aimed at players who are less experienced with solver tools or tournament poker study. While experienced players may learn from this course, their learnings are likely to come from how to use the platform and tools themselves rather than from the theory being taught.
Begin your poker climb today
Get the course