GTO Wizard is, by most measures, the best game theory training tool poker has. It is also, after its 2026 pricing changes, one of the more expensive, and the increases reignited a familiar debate among players: how much solver do I actually need, and what are the alternatives. This is an honest attempt to answer that, including where our own product fits and, just as importantly, where it does not.
What GTO Wizard costs now
As of 2026, GTO Wizard runs four tiers: roughly 26 dollars a month for Starter, 44 for Premium, 116 for Elite and 206 for Ultra, with annual billing knocking around 20 percent off. Premium, at about 44 dollars a month, is the tier most recreational players land on. The early-2026 increases pushed the middle tiers up, which is what put the price question back on the table for a lot of players.
None of this is a knock on the product. GTO Wizard's library, speed and breadth are genuinely excellent, and for a serious tournament or high-stakes cash professional, the cost is easily justified. The question is whether that describes you.
The honest question: how much solver do you need?
Here is the thing the pricing debate usually skips. Most players do not have a solver problem. They have an execution problem. They already know, roughly, the right play in most spots. What they cannot do is produce it quickly, under pressure, at the table. A more powerful solver does not fix that, because a solver trains understanding, not automatic execution. If you are grinding solver outputs and not improving, more solver is unlikely to be the answer.
That reframing matters, because it changes what "alternative" means. Some players genuinely need a cheaper solver. Many more need a different kind of tool entirely.
The alternatives, briefly and fairly
If you want a solver-style trainer for less, the field has real options. DTO Poker offers structured trainer drills with free access and paid tiers roughly in the 10 to 33 dollar range. Preflop-focused tools like Preflop Wizard cover preflop decisions cheaply but do not attempt postflop. Octopi and PokerSnowie take different approaches to feedback-driven training. And LeakSeek offers free, mobile-first solver-backed drills with no tracker attached. Each is a legitimate choice depending on what you actually want to train.
Where drills.poker fits, and where it does not
Let us be clear about what drills.poker is, because it is not a GTO Wizard competitor in the strict sense. It is not a solver. If you want to run a specific river spot to a precise frequency and study the exact solver output, drills.poker is the wrong tool and GTO Wizard or DTO is the right one.
What drills.poker is, at 9.99 pounds a month for Pro, is a different product built on a different bet: that most players improve faster by drilling fundamentals into instinct and tracking their results than by studying more theory. It gives you nine timed drills that turn pot odds, equity, combinatorics and range reading into automatic recognition, plus a full live-first bankroll tracker that proves whether the training is showing up in pounds. The philosophy, laid out in Why Solver Study Does Not Stick, is that solvers teach, trackers count, and drills train, and that the training half is what most players are missing.
So the honest recommendation is this. If you are a serious professional who needs deep solver work, keep GTO Wizard, and consider pairing it with drilling so the theory becomes reflex. If you are a recreational or semi-serious player who suspects you know more than you can execute, a tenth of the price spent on drills and tracking will probably do more for your results than a bigger solver. The GTO Principles drill covers the load-bearing theory itself, explained in GTO Basics Worth Drilling.
Work out whether your problem is knowledge or execution, then spend accordingly. Start training free at drills.poker.