Simbot vs GTOWizard - How Pros Use Both

“Should I get Simbot or GTOWizard?” is a question we hear a lot, and the answer may surprise you. Simbot and GTOWizard solve different problems, and the players improving fastest are actually using both. Here is a breakdown of what each tool does best, where each falls short, and how serious MTT players combine them.

What GTOWizard does well

One has to admit: GTOWizard is an excellent product. It’s the de facto standard for postflop study, it gives you an enormous library of pre-solved preflop solutions, a trainer you can use to drill against the solver, and aggregate reports that teach patterns across all possible runouts. For building postflop fundamentals and getting daily repetitions in, it is hard to beat.

Because preflop sims are pre-solved, lookup is immediate. Click a spot, see the ranges. That convenience is huge, and for common spots that’s exactly what you want.

Where it falls short for MTT players

The pre-solved model has a structural limit: your specific spot needs to have been solved in advance. GTOWizard’s preflop library covers common stack distributions with fixed bet sizings and standardized payout structure assumptions. MTT spots unfortunately don’t work like that:

• You’re on a 3-handed final table with stacks of 48.6bb, 14.8bb, and 25.9bb, and a uniquely top-heavy payout structure. No fixed library has it.
• PKO spots depend on the exact bounties on each head. The strategy of a covering player with a 2x average bounty behind looks nothing like the standard version of the spot.
• Mystery Bounty tournaments, satellites, and other unusual payout structures change preflop ranges massively, and they change them the most, exactly where the most money is on the line.

GTOWizard knows this, which is why it recently released a flexible preflop tool that solves custom spots on demand. It renders results fast, but it is new, and from our tests the accuracy of the results looks very questionable. When big money rides on a critical final table decision, “fast” is not the property you optimize for.

What Simbot does

Simbot is built for exactly the spots the fixed libraries can’t reach. It runs HRC, the #1 preflop solver tournament pros have trusted for years, on dedicated servers, with none of the setup HRC is infamous for:

• Screenshot to sim. Paste a screenshot or hand history, and stacks, seats, bounties, and payouts are parsed automatically. Configure the equity model and hit run.
• Any structure. ICM, Multi-Table ICM, PKO with per-player bounties, Mystery Bounties with your prize pool, satellites, and fully custom payout structures. Unlimited sims on every plan.
• An interactive range viewer. Range grids, action frequencies, and EV at every node of the tree, on desktop and mobile. Nodelocking and subtree sampling when you want to go deeper on a line.
• Study Groups. One subscription shared across a group, with a common sim library. Read more on that here.

The honest tradeoffs: Simbot is preflop only and tournament only, and sims are computed fresh, so they take minutes to hours depending on plan and sim complexity. That’s the price of professional-grade accuracy. To optimize your workflow, queue a bunch of sims in a batch and study them when they’re done, instead of waiting at the keyboard.

Side by side

How pros use both

The combination of Simbot and GTOWizard works extremely well because the tools cover each other’s weaknesses. A typical weekly structure of a professional player might look like this:

1. Daily reps in GTOWizard. Postflop drills to keep fundamentals sharp. Quick lookups for common preflop spots during session warmup.
2. Screenshot the spots you’re unsure about while playing. Any hand where ICM factors, the stack distribution, or bounties made the decision unclear gets captured and saved.
3. Queue Simbot sims after the session. Upload the screenshots, batch the sims overnight, and review them the next morning with the exact stacks and payouts you actually faced.
4. Prep for the series with a self-owned sim library. Before a big series, build coverage of the spots you expect: short-stack PKO spots, bubble spots, mid-stack vs big-stack final table spots, etc. Internalize them and use GTOWizard to drill the postflop trees that follow from those ranges.
5. Lean on Simbot hardest at final tables and bubble spots. Basic preflop assumptions break down worst under heavy ICM, and that is where most of a tournament player’s yearly EV is decided.

Regarding cost: Both tools’ subscriptions land in a similar range, but a Simbot plan can be shared through a Study Group, so sharing a plan with three or four players means that Simbot ends up being much more affordable.

Conclusion

If you mostly play cash, or you want immediate one-click answers for common spots, GTOWizard alone will serve you well. If you grind MTTs seriously, the decisions that define your year are preflop decisions in spots no fixed library covers, and studying them with a trusted engine is what Simbot exists for.

Most of our users didn’t cancel GTOWizard. They added the tool that lets them study their exact spots. The 7-day free trial is the cheapest way to find out whether that workflow changes your game.