We are living in an era of poker solvers. These days, almost all serious poker players use solvers to help them improve, and there are currently a few main options to choose from. Octopi Poker is the most recent arrival to this space.
I was aware of the Octopi Poker brand, primarily thanks to its strong presence at the 2025 World Series of Poker, but a solver is a solver, right? Unless you’re in the top 1% of all players, where you can recognize and actually take advantage of subtle differences between products, it almost feels like it doesn’t matter which one you go with. That’s why when I was first tasked with writing a review of the platform, I honestly didn’t have big expectations.
Having now spent quite a few hours using the Octopi Poker platform and even having had the chance to speak with some people behind the project, I must say that my initial assumptions were completely off.
Octopi Poker isn’t just “another solver.” It’s so much more than that, and the solver part of it has been designed in a very user-friendly, intuitive way. There is a lot to cover, so let’s dig into this extensive Octopi Poker review, and I’ll do my best to paint a full picture of this innovative platform that caters to both tournament players as well as cash game grinders, from hardened pros to casual poker fans.
Octopi Poker at a Glance: What Is It About?
At its core, Octopi is a poker solver tool, and a very good one at that. The site is divided into a number of main categories that we’ll cover in more depth, but here’s a quick breakdown:
- Sims – look up and explore an extensive library of pre-solved simulations, including chipEV even and uneven stacks, ICM, final tables and more.
- Trainer – pick a spot & play through simulated hands, with your performance graded in real time.
- My Hands – import your own poker hands to have them analyzed by the solver.
- The Vault – a truly outstanding feature of Octopi Poker, breaking down hands played by top-level pros in big tournaments (Triton, PGT, WSOP, etc.), accompanied by the relevant video footage.
- Ask George – chat with Octopi’s AI assistant, who’ll happily help you find your way around the site and get you started.
While the platform’s main goal is to teach you how to become a better player, it also offers quite a few elements that are there primarily for fun. The site could exist without them and not lose any of its quality, but with them it becomes much more attractive to casual players who have yet to develop an affinity for solvers.
Octopi Poker Hand Trainer: Active Learning
The poker hand trainer is one of the most useful tools on the site as it’s something that you can use regardless of what level your game is at. It’s an excellent way to actively improve your understanding of the game, recognize the mistakes you make most often, and gradually remove them.
The Octopi Poker Hand Trainer allows you to set up ‘Drills,’ and you can choose from a variety of options, such as:
- Format (8-max (MTT), 6-max (Cash), heads-up)
- Preflop, postflop, or complete hand
- Stack depth (10 – 100 big blinds)
- Your position
- Your opponent’s position
- Actions (folds to you, facing a raise, facing a 3-bet, etc.)
- Board textures (paired, flush draw flop turn flush, A high, etc.)
- Your hand classes (small pairs, AK, suited connectors, etc.)
With this, you can set up very specific spots that you want to train, so it works for players of all levels. You can use the trainer for something as simple as checking your knowledge of cutoff opening ranges or to analyze the GTO strategy in UTG vs. big blind 3-bet spots.
Once you set everything up, you simply click ‘Train’, and you can start playing through hands featuring your specific scenario. You can choose from a few different options, and after you make your decision you’ll get a message about whether the play was correct or not.
On the right-hand side, there is a very convenient hand tree, where you can hover over a spot to see what their raising, folding, and/or 3-betting ranges are in a given situation. This is very useful, especially in marginal situations, where you might feel that a hand like T8s is a fold, but want to know if T9s or TJs plays differently.
All the elements tie in together very nicely once you figure out the interface, which shouldn’t take you more than a few minutes.
If you don’t feel like analyzing a particular spot but still want to have a light training session, you can simply fire up a trainer, and it will give you a chance to play through a variety of actual hands stored on the site. You’ll play in different spots and at different stack depths, which can be a great way to warm up before a session or something to do in preparation for a tournament.
The Vault: Combining Fun and Education
As mentioned at the start of this Octopi Poker review, The Vault is a truly unique aspect of this platform and something that helps it stand out versus the competition.
Inside, you’ll find a breakdown of hands from major poker tournaments, including PokerGO Tour events, the World Series of Poker, and more.
The site has a dedicated team working behind the scenes to collect these hands from live streams, add them to the platform, and run simulations on them. All hands are broken down by factors such as the players involved, stack depth, ICM implications, etc.
You can pick any hand to play through, have your decisions compared to those made by the player whose seat you’re taking, and also see how they compare to the GTO strategy. Plus, every hand has an actual video accompanying it, so you can watch the action as it actually played out.
If you’re interested in learning from the real life experience of a particular poker pro, simply click their name to get a full list of all the hands they were involved in available on the site.
When you click the Players tab, you’ll get the full list of all players, combined with the total number of featured hands they’re in, as well as fun stats, such as their total winnings, biggest score, and ‘luck,’ i.e., how their actual results compare to their EV.
Players you’ll find featured inside The Vault include the likes of Alex Foxen, Sean Winter, Ike Haxton, Daniel Negreanu, Fedor Holz, Bryn Kenney, and many more. There are over 100 individual players featured on the site, and new hands are added all the time.
So, for example, you can select a final table and choose which player to “play as”. In the example image below, you’d be playing “as Alex Foxen” and could make your move. The solver would then score that against what the optimal play is, as well versus what Foxen actually did in real time at that final table.
This represents a perfect blend of a learning tool and something you could enjoy as a poker fan. It gives you quick and easy access to some of the biggest and most significant hands played by some of the biggest names in all of poker, including the video footage of those hands. You can literally spend hours in The Vault just browsing the hands.
Browsing Sims with Octopi Poker
Octopi Poker’s Sims section offers tools for beginners and advanced players alike. Although the term “sims” is usually connected to high-level hand analysis that only serious pros tend to be interested in, this product has some great tools designed for beginners and mid-level players.
The sims library features an extensive catalogue of situations for studying different phases of poker tournaments. There are standard preflop ranges, along with thousands of pre-bubble spots, bubble situations, and final tables. New sims are also added all the time.
You can get all the preflop ranges for every single position at the table for any stack depth between 10 and 100 big blinds. Plus, there is also the ‘Compare Ranges’ option, which allows you to have charts for different positions displayed next to each other.
The “Range Map”, circled in blue in the above image, is unique to Octopi Poker. It’s great for improving your preflop play, as it shows you exactly how ranges change and shift as you move around the table, making it much easier to memorize where the margins are.
Plus, in addition to the standard chip EV ranges, Octopi also has ICM calculations, so you can run comparisons between usual ranges and how they change in different ICM spots.
While it may sound a bit complicated when you’re reading about it, setting all this up literally takes just a few clicks, and you’ll have no problem figuring out where all the settings are because the interface is very clean.
Of course, for those looking to do some deeper poker study, the Sims section also allows you to search for solved hands within the database that are an exact match or fairly similar to your setup in terms of positions, actions, and stack depths.
These features are certainly more useful for players who already have a fair bit of experience with solvers, showing once more how Octopi Poker manages to cater to a full scope of players. From just having fun to doing some light studying to deep-dive analysis, the platform has it all.
The Verdict: Is Octopi Poker a Worthwhile Investment?
I’m not a poker pro, so my level of poker knowledge and expertise isn’t such that I could tell you whether one solver output is better than another. When using this type of software, I trust that the team working behind the scenes did the math right. From what I can tell as a serious and experienced recreational player, there are no outputs in Octopi Poker that seem wrong or out of place.
Beyond that, this platform certainly offers a lot extra that makes it stand out. As far as the solver itself is concerned, it’s just easier to navigate than anything else I’ve seen on the market – everything is in one place, and you don’t have to deal with popups or moving back and forth between screens.
The Vault is a proper gem, even if your interest in solvers is only marginal. To have all those hands in one place, broken down play by play, sorted by player names, positions, and tournament situations is just next level. You can learn from the best, see how they play, where their strategy may deviate from the GTO, and try to understand why.
And, believe it or not, as comprehensive as this Octopi Poker review is, there are other features that I didn’t even mention, such as opportunities to purchase coaching packages with some of the best players in the game!
The platform offers different tier levels and membership options, so whatever your current skill level and money situation may be, you should be able to find the one that fits your particular situation and give it a try. There’s also a helpful page that allows you to compare the different plans, in order to help you decide which one is right for you.
Even if you end up using only 20% – 30% of what’s available on the site, with everything Octopi Poker has to offer it’s really hard to see how this wouldn’t be a good investment in your poker future.
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