Oleg Ostroumov’s journey from broke college dropout to tech pioneer in poker is one of ingenuity, timing, and persistence. Before solvers revolutionized the way players study poker, Oleg was already years ahead of the curve. By 23, he had created the world’s first No-Limit Hold’em solver, sold it to elite high-stakes pros, and made half a million dollars.
Falling in Love With Poker
In 2008, Oleg met a professional poker player and learned how the poker world functions. Oleg was a math student who loved video games, so poker was a perfect fit because it is based on probability theory. As Oleg said, poker offered one thing he loved more than video games and math, and it was money.
Oleg rapidly rose in poker, going from NL2 to NL1000 in a year and a half, making $40,000, and moving out of his parents’ house.
Creating a Monster
By 2012, there were no tools on the market capable of calculating the Nash Equilibrium for poker, and Oleg was competent at programming and handling complex algorithms, so he got the idea to make one. By January 2013, after six months of experimentation and coding, Oleg managed to create a program for No-Limit Hold’em, which calculated an approximation of the Nash Equilibrium, starting from the flop, with two active players and a limited set of allowed bet sizes.
The program used a random strategy, which evolved as it played against itself, improving in each iteration by increasing the frequency of more profitable actions. Oleg realized he had created something that was about to change the world of poker and the way players study and understand the game. The first No-Limit Hold’em solver was born!
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Finding Customers
As a 22-year-old student, Oleg had no experience in the business world or selling, and one of the main problems was setting the price for the solver. The only similar product in the market was StoxEV (later known as CardrunnersEV), but it was much simpler, only offered solutions for trivial spots, and cost $50. Oleg knew his product was worth more, so he decided to sell it for a premium price to a smaller group of elite poker players.
The benchmark Oleg used was the hourly coaching rate of a top 20 poker player, which was $1,000/hour. This rate was hard to find as most top poker players prefer playing to coaching. Oleg saw his product as a poker coach who would provide infinite hours of coaching, so he decided to set his price between $50,000 and $100,000. This wasn’t a speculative offer, as he already had a customer waiting in line. The customer’s name was Trueteller.
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Truteller was one of the best high-stakes players who previously won around $2,000,000 playing No-Limit Hold’em. Oleg got Trueteller’s Skype contact through a person they both knew, and the negotiations have started. Oleg mentioned that negotiating business with one of his toughest opponents, who was mysterious and didn’t communicate much with anyone in the poker world, was really exciting.
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Trueteller started to realize the solver’s effectiveness once he saw the image above, but he still wasn’t convinced, as there was a possibility that Oleg hardcoded or overfitted the algorithm to produce correct outputs in a specific spot.
Both Oleg and Truetellet were convinced that the product was worth six figures, but the deal kept getting delayed as there wasn’t enough mutual trust. The negotiations were not finished even after a month and a half, and both sides were getting irritated, so Oleg told Trueteller that he should be paying $5,000 per week as he got exclusive use of the solver and kept delaying the deal. Trueteller was irritated by that and told Oleg he should be paying him $2,000 per hour as he was missing that while they were negotiating.
This was the point at which their relationship might have been damaged, and Oleg felt like he was wasting time and started looking for new customers.
The first attempts at finding customers were not going well. The players he knew were skeptical about the price and the effectiveness of the solver, not realizing the potential. Top heads-up players were also ignoring Oleg’s messages, thinking that his offer was a scam.
Running Out of Money and Time
While developing the solver and negotiating with players, Oleg wasn’t playing any poker, and he was running out of money. With only $6,000 left and $1,500 in monthly expenses, he didn’t want to settle for a price less than $200,000.
He eventually contacted Alex ‘Kanu7’ Millar, a top-10 heads-up player at the time, and presented the solver to him and a group of his interested friends. But there was no deal, and the situation was getting bad for Oleg as everything he was doing was sitting and waiting to hear a notification on Skype that was not coming.
Hitting the Jackpot
In April 2013, Oleg finally did it. He managed to make a deal with six players led by Kanu and secured compensation of $200,000, which was released in portions spread over a year and a half. The initial portions were bigger as the solver’s initial impact on their game would be significantly more valuable. Additionally, Oleg managed to make a deal with Trueteller as well, and both sides knew about the other side having the solver.
Inspired by the success of his No Limit Holdem solver, Oleg decided to create a PLO solver, which he sold for $300,000, bringing his total earnings from selling solvers to $500,000.
Two years later, the first major competitor solver was launched, selling for $500/license, but Oleg didn’t want to go into pricing wars and moved to other projects. He also realized that was a mistake and regrets that decision, as today’s Holdem solver market is around $10,000,000 annually.
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