When most people think about poker improvement, they think about solvers, optimal ranges, and endless YouTube breakdowns of big hands. But according to Jason Gondziola, that’s not the real bottleneck. Poker isn’t starving for knowledge. It’s drowning in it. What it lacks is infrastructure: a consistent, rigorous way to assess performance and manage learning over time.
In this episode of SaaS That App - Building Tech-Enabled Businesses, Jason, Owner and Lead Developer at Stratagem, joined Aaron Marchbanks and Justin Edwards to share why he’s building what he believes is the world’s first dedicated poker learning management system and how it aims to solve what he calls the assessment paradox.
The Assessment Paradox
Jason describes the core problem clearly: “Assessment is known across multiple domains, but certainly within poker, to be the best path, the best way to articulate improvement, degradation, trend lines, spots where interventions are needed, yet we see this sort of resistant environment that's holding it up.”
In poker, everyone agrees that tracking performance matters. Yet most players rely on scattered hand histories, intuition, or occasional coaching sessions. Coaches juggle emails, exported files, notes, and third-party tools. There’s no shared backbone for measuring progress in a structured way.
Stratagem is designed to change that. Rather than flooding players with more theory, it gives coaches a centralized system to store, annotate, and drill knowledge. The goal isn’t more content. It’s better reinforcement, clearer analytics, and fewer administrative headaches.
Knowledge Management Over Knowledge Creation
Poker has entered the age of solvers. These algorithms generate optimal strategies by playing against themselves, producing massive libraries of correct decisions. But as Jason explains, the market now has a large glut of knowledge creation.
What’s missing is knowledge management.
Stratagem doesn’t come preloaded with lessons. Instead, it gives coaches the infrastructure to input their own material and create targeted drills. For example, if a common weakness in a player pool is failing to punish a passive small blind limp, a coach can create a scenario-based drill and blend it with other hands so learning happens in context.
This blending matters. Players don’t just memorize a rule like always raise. They practice recognizing situations in a realistic flow of decisions. Over time, analytics dashboards track both right and wrong decisions, heat maps, and additional behavioral markers to reveal where improvements are happening or stagnating.
Collapsing a Messy Workflow into One System
One of the clearest value propositions of Stratagem is operational simplicity.
Today, a typical coaching workflow might look like this: a player exports hand histories from tracking software, emails them to a coach, the coach downloads them, opens them in another tool, annotates feedback separately, and schedules review time. It’s fragmented and time-consuming.
Stratagem collapses that into a single interface. Players upload hands directly. Coaches tag and annotate them within the system. Those hands can then be queued for structured review or integrated into drills. The result is less friction and more time spent on actual strategy.
For high hourly rate coaches, shaving off ‘tiny little fractional two minutes here, three minutes there’ adds up quickly.
AI as a Multiplier, Not a Replacement
Jason is building Stratagem solo and fully bootstrapped. He credits AI-assisted development as essential: “The LLM-enabled coding environments, I couldn’t have done without it. I just wouldn’t have had the time or the bankroll.”
His stack includes PostgreSQL, a Node API layer, and React, all developed inside an AI-augmented IDE. He’s also written internal tooling to manage dependencies and workflows as a solo founder.
Inside the product, AI is used pragmatically. One example is natural language processing to transcribe spoken hand histories into structured notation. For live players, this removes a painful data-entry bottleneck.
But Jason draws a clear line. He does not want to deliver the poison pill that replaces human coaching. “I really think human-to-human contact is important.” The platform is meant to remove clutter and admin work so that human judgment can shine.
Designing UX That Enforces Good TeachingF
A particularly interesting layer of Stratagem is its pedagogical intent.
Poker coaches are rarely trained educators. Jason is working with an instructional design consultant to ensure the UI itself nudges coaches toward best practices in adult learning. Rather than assuming coaches know how to structure reinforcement and progression, the system guides them.
Final Thoughts
Stratagem isn’t trying to out-solver the solvers. It’s trying to make poker improvement measurable, structured, and sustainable. If successful, Stratagem could shift poker coaching from intuition-driven to data-informed without sacrificing the human element.
In a market saturated with answers, the real edge may come from better questions and better tracking of how those answers change performance over time.
Jason’s Background
Jason Gondziola is a software developer, data manager, and founder of Stratagem, a poker learning management system designed to streamline coaching workflows and player assessment. With a background in philosophy, an MBA, and extensive experience in software development and change management, Jason brings a uniquely interdisciplinary approach to solving the assessment paradox in poker coaching.
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