10¹⁶⁰: The Number That Took Poker Decades to Beat — and 5 Seconds to Answer
Chess has about 10⁴⁷ positions. No-Limit Hold'em has about 10¹⁶⁰. That ratio is the whole story of why the machine beat chess in 1997 and poker in 2019 — and why the machine now answers either one in seconds on a cloud invoice.
The number that made poker "impossible"
Every game falls the same way, and the number is the map.
Chess: a fixed board, perfect information, roughly 10⁴⁷ reachable positions. The engineers called it hard and then called it solved — Deep Blue beat Kasparov in 1997, and by the 2000s the analysis-grade engine was a free download on every club player's phone.
No-Limit Hold'em: two hidden cards, bluffing as a core mechanic, and a game tree of roughly 10¹⁶⁰ reachable states. That's not "hard" the way chess was hard. That's 113 orders of magnitude more. The poker version of the chess number isn't bigger — it's from a different branch of mathematics.
The engineers said impossible for decades. They were wrong, but they weren't wrong about how long it would take. It took three lab breakthroughs:
- 2015 — UMass mathematicians solve Limit Hold'em. The first rigorous proof that poker is a solvable game. (Limit, not No-Limit — the crack starts small.)
- 2017 — Libratus (Carnegie Mellon) beats a world champion heads-up No-Limit. The Deep Blue match, replayed at a poker table, twenty years later.
- 2019 — Pluribus (Facebook) plays six-max No-Limit against four of the world's best human players — four on one — and wins the majority of the hands. The full game. The full table. The number, answered.
And then, for seven years, 10¹⁶⁰ had an answer and nobody could buy it. Pluribus was research; the engine lived in a server rack behind a paper. The field kept playing charts and gut while the math existed in a lab.
Until the math got a billing page.
The engine, off the paper
MonsterSolver is a state-of-the-art GTO poker software — a No-Limit Hold'em solver running a neural solving engine on cloud GPUs. You give it a spot: exact hand, exact board, exact stacks, any action history, 2 to 6 players. It returns the GTO-optimal strategy for that precise situation in seconds — a complete range grid with action frequencies and EV for every line.
Read that again through the lens of the number: a slice of the 10¹⁶⁰ problem — your node, your spot — answered in seconds, on hardware that isn't yours.
No tree building. No Java flags. No 64–128GB of RAM. No $249–$1,100 license plus a two-week tutorial. A small prepaid balance, pay only for what you solve, free credits at signup. The compute lives in a data center, not your basement.
Their about page says it best: "fast, affordable and available to everyone — not just pros with a server rack in the basement."
"Cracked" — the word the math actually supports
Be precise, because the number is big enough to hide imprecision: nobody printed the complete strategy for No-Limit Hold'em. 10¹⁶⁰ states means the full solution isn't coming, and anyone who promises it is selling something.
But chess was never "solved" either — it was cracked. The day amateur-runnable analysis arrived, the best human in the world quietly became the second-best player in the room. Nobody needed the complete solution; they needed the answer key for the position in front of them — and a position, in context, is a manageable problem.
That's exactly what a solver returns — for your exact hand, on your exact board, at your exact stack depth. The neural approximations are already strong enough that no human plays closer to equilibrium than the software. Pluribus beat four pros on exactly that strength. Every solve MonsterSolver returns is a slice of the 10¹⁶⁰ answer, pointed at the node you're holding.
Why the old tools couldn't touch the number
The pre-2019 toolkit all ran into the same wall:
- Charts are a snapshot of someone else's assumptions — your stacks, your board, your opponents' actual action line, a chart can't see.
- Pre-solved libraries (GTO Wizard-style) are great for drilling, but they answer their spots at their sizings and their rake. Change the stack depth or bet size and you're studying a game you're not playing.
- Desktop solvers (PioSolver, MonkerSolver) can solve your exact tree — the gold standard for deep research — but the tree is the number: build it, abstract it, and wait hours for convergence on 64–128GB of RAM you have to buy first. The number was always going to tax the machine, not the player — until the machine stopped being yours.
MonsterSolver collapses all of it: type the spot, get the answer, seconds later. Preflop and postflop, any board, any sizing, 2 to 6 players. And because it reads the table itself, this RTA poker software works with virtually every client — no per-room plugins, no hand-history plumbing. It sees what you see, on whatever site you sit at.
"But it can run at the table, right?"
Yes. Full transparency: MonsterSolver is RTA-capable. It reads the table on virtually every popular poker site and returns an answer in 1–5 seconds to each situation — live, in real-money games.
We don't recommend using it that way. It's not fair — no opponent at your table has an answer key, and MonsterSolver's own fair-use policy says study and training only, never real-time assistance in real-money play. And it's non-human — that's the tell. You might never get caught, but use it often and you'll always win, and a consistent, humanly-impossible win rate is exactly what detection teams look for. When they do flag you, the penalty at every legitimate room is the same: permanent closure, fund seizure, blacklist. Don't be the case study.
Use it the three ways it's worth the money:
1. Training — drill spots in play-money, compare your instinct to the solve, build the ranges into your brain. 2. Post-game analysis — point it at the session you just played; every spot solved against your exact ranges before you've made coffee. 3. Streaming — run the solve on stream and let your chat watch the best move appear, the way televised poker commentary calls the "right" play. The audience gets the analysis; the table stays honest.
The software doesn't beat poker geniuses at their table. It beats them in the training room — every single session.
The math (the small kind)
The old entry cost for real solver study was a stack: a $249–$1,100 license, a machine upgrade, a learning curve in weeks. The new entry cost is a small balance of prepaid credits — pay only for what you solve, free credits at signup. One real leak found in week one pays for the lifetime. Coaches and content creators take a 30% referral share, which makes this article its own business model.
The number, answered
For decades, 10¹⁶⁰ was the reason poker was still a human game. It wasn't. It was just the reason the humans couldn't get the answer without a lab.
Now the answer takes 5 seconds, and it costs a coffee.
The only question left is which side of the board you're on.