How the drills work

Counting the Pot What is actually in the middle

What it asks: The action is on you. How many chips are sitting in the middle?

Every other drill in here starts by telling you the size of the pot. This one doesn't, because at a table nobody tells you. In a tournament the dealer will say it if you ask. In a cash game nobody will say it at all. So the number every other calculation in this app is built on is one you have to get yourself, in your head, while it's your turn.

It comes first because everything else sits on top of it. A price worked out perfectly against a pot that's fifteen chips light is still a wrong answer. That's the worst kind, because nothing about it feels like a guess.

How it works

You see a hand as it was played, seat by seat, stopped at the moment it's your turn. Add up what's on the felt. Two rules do almost all of the work, and people get both of them wrong in the same direction.

First: every number on the felt is a total. "Raise to 35" means that seat now has 35 out there for the round, however much they had in before. A limper who was in for 5 has just put in thirty more, not thirty-five more. This isn't only about raises. The first place anybody meets it is much quieter than that. The small blind who posted 1 and then calls 2 has put in one more chip. They have 2 in front of them, not 3.

Second: chips don't leave. A player who folds leaves everything they've already put in behind. It stays in the middle for somebody else to win. The player is gone. The chips are not.

A raise is a total. A fold leaves the chips behind. Your own call is not in yet.

An example

The number almost everybody gets

Read every number as chips going in, rather than as what a seat has in front of them, and that pot comes to 122. Two chips on one hand, which is nothing. The trouble is that it's two chips for every seat that acted twice with money out, every hand, always in the same direction. So your pot is always bigger than the real one. Four raises deep in a three-bet pot it's a full blind or more. A pot that's a blind too big makes a marginal call look good.

It's worth meeting this on the smallest hand it happens on. Blinds are 1 and 2, nobody raises at all, three players limp and the small blind completes. The answer is 10 and the miscount is 11. One chip, because the blind's call of 2 got heard as two more on top of the one already up. The drill will tell you that's what you did.

One more worth naming, because it isn't really a mistake. Add your own call and you get 180. That's a real number. It's what you'd be playing to win if you call, and it's exactly what Pot Odds wants. It just isn't what's in the middle, because you haven't put it in yet.

What the levels do

One thing at a time, and none of it is harder math. Level 1 is blinds and limpers, where the only way to be wrong is to forget the blinds. Level 2 adds players who leave the hand with chips in it. Level 3 is raises over raises, which is where reading "to" as "more" comes apart fastest. Level 4 puts money up before the deal, an ante or a straddle, and gives the hand a second round to carry forward. Level 5 is all of it at once, with somebody all in for less than the bet.

That last one adds a fact rather than a sum. Their chips are in the middle like anybody else's, and the total is the total. But they can only win the part everybody matched. The rest is a side pot they're not in, so the number you're counting isn't all one prize. The drill tells you after you've answered, because it changes who collects rather than what's there.

Reading the Board The hand you actually hold

What it asks: Seven cards you can see, and five of them are your hand. Which five?

Every other drill here hands you a hand and asks for a number. This one asks for the hand. It's the drill the rest of the app has been assuming all along. An out is a card that takes you from behind, or level, to in front, and all three of those words compare two five-card hands.

It's also the one most people think they already have. Reading a board isn't hard. Reading it under a bet, at a table, with the dealer waiting, is where it goes. The mistakes aren't exotic. They're the same four every time.

How it works

Your hand is the best five of the seven cards you can see: your two and the five in the middle. Not your two plus whatever helps. The best five out of all seven, and some of your seven simply aren't in it.

That's the sentence the whole drill is built on, and it has a consequence people resist. You don't have to use either of your cards. About one river in twenty, the best five you can make are the five lying in the middle. That means you're holding nothing anybody else at the table isn't.

The best five of the seven. Sometimes both of yours are in it, more often one, sometimes neither.

An example

The four ways it goes wrong

Every wrong answer this drill offers is a real five-card hand made of cards on the table. None of them is invented. A button naming cards nobody holds could be crossed off by counting suits instead of by reading a hand, and that would be a different skill.

The second is forcing both of your cards in. You have a seven and a four, so surely both are doing something. One of them isn't, and which one is the question. The third is reading their hand instead of yours. That sounds careless, and it's the most common error at a real showdown, because their cards are the ones you've been staring at. The fourth is the opposite: reading the board and stopping there, when your card does play.

What the levels do

One fact at a time, and it's always the same fact asked harder: how many of your two cards are actually in the five. Level 1 is both of them, on a board with nothing going on. Level 2 is one of them, where the other has to beat something in the middle to get in and doesn't. Level 3 pairs the board, so there's a pair in the middle before your cards do anything, and the question is which two pairs make the five. Level 4 puts the board one card from a straight or a flush, where whether you have it is a real question. Level 5 is neither of them.

That last one is worth the climb. When the five in the middle are your best five, you're playing the board, and so is everybody else who can't beat it. The pot gets split, and it gets split whatever you were holding. It's the one place in this app where a chop isn't part of an answer but the whole answer.

The showdown is printed under every answer, whether you got it right or wrong, and whether the pot went to you, to them, or down the middle. That's on purpose. A line that only showed up on the hands that split would tell you they'd split before you'd worked anything out.

Counting Outs How many cards win it

What it asks: How many of the cards still to come would put you in front?

This is the one most of the others are built on. You're behind, or level with them, and there are cards to come. Before you can tell whether a call is worth making, you need to know how many cards put you in front. A card that puts you in front is called an out. Counting them is a skill you can learn in an afternoon and use forever.

How it works

There are 52 cards. At a table you'd see five of them, your two and the three on the board, which leaves 47 you can't see. That 47 is what the percentages on this page are worked out over. This drill turns their two cards face up as well, because an out only means something against a hand you're trying to beat. So only 45 of those 47 can actually arrive, and 45 is the number the screen prints under the question. Your job is to find the cards among those 45 that win it for you.

The counting isn't quite as simple as it looks, which is why it's worth drilling. A card has to actually win to be an out. A heart that completes your flush and also pairs the board, handing them a full house, is not an out. And a card sitting in their hand can't come at all, so it doesn't count either.

An example

The shortcut

Multiply your outs by 2 for one card to come, or by 4 for two. It has a name, the Rule of 2 and 4, and that's the name the drill uses when it marks your answer. Nine outs times four is 36%, and the real answer above is 34.97%. Two things to carry with it. The times four figure covers both cards, so it only answers a call nobody can bet into again. An ordinary flop call buys the turn alone, which is 19.1% here. The shortcut also runs high once the outs pile up, about six points out at 15 outs and fourteen at 21. The drill prints the shortcut and the exact figure side by side so you learn where it drifts.

What the levels do

Level 1 is one clean count: every card you're counting makes you the same hand. Level 2 lets a second kind of draw into the same hand, so some of these ask you to count two groups without counting the shared cards twice. Level 3 always has more than one group, and it's where some of your outs start turning up in the other player's hand. Level 4 stops protecting you from anything, including hands where the honest answer is zero. Level 5 does the same on the turn, with one card to come instead of two. The shortcut is times 2, and the count runs against 46 cards rather than 47.

Outs Against You How many cards take it away

What it asks: You are ahead. How many of the cards still to come beat you?

The same count from the other chair, and the one worth being able to do. This is the hand you replay on the drive home. You had the best hand, a card came, and it felt like being cheated. It wasn't. It was a number you could have known.

How it works

Exactly like counting your own outs, except you're counting theirs. A card in somebody's hand can't come, which you already know, and from this side it works both ways. The cards in their hand are off the deck, and so is any card in your own hand that would have beaten you. What changes is the direction of the mistake. Count too many here and the danger looks bigger than it is, so you fold a hand that was ahead.

An example

That survival figure isn't worked out by subtracting. The app deals out every possible way the last two cards can come and counts the ones that don't leave them in front, split pots included. The two answers aren't the same. There are runouts where one of their cards arrives and you win anyway, and runouts where neither arrives and you lose to something nobody was counting.

What the levels do

Levels 1 and 2 are clean counts. Level 3 starts putting cards that would have beaten you into your own hand, where they can't arrive at all. The count comes out shorter than their draw looks. Level 4 stops protecting you from anything, including the spot that is the whole point of this drill: nothing at all beats you on the next card, and you still lose sometimes, because two cards are coming and they can arrive together. Level 5 moves to the turn.

Charging the Draw What it costs to price them out

What it asks: They are drawing and you are ahead. What is the biggest bet their draw can call?

Outs Against You teaches you to count the cards that beat you. This is the question that comes next, and nobody at a home game has ever worked it out. Those cards are going to come some of the time. What does it cost you to make them pay for the privilege? You're ahead, they're drawing, and the chips going in are yours rather than theirs, the same as in Fold Equity.

How it works

It's Pot Odds solved backwards. There, you know the bet and work out the share it demands. Here you know their share and work out the bet that demands it. The thing being solved for has moved to the other side, and that's the whole difference.

The catch is what the bet is buying. You have chips behind, so you can bet again on the next street. That means their call is paying for one card, not two. Everything in this drill follows from that sentence.

An example

The number almost everybody uses

A flush draw is "about 35%". Every player who has done any reading at all knows that figure, and on this hand it's 39%. It's also the answer to a question nobody asked, because it's what the draw is worth by the river, across two cards. Your bet is buying them one.

The difference isn't small. Priced against 20%, the line is 50. Priced against 39%, it's 275, which is nearly twice the pot. A player working from the bigger number looks at a pot-sized bet, decides it's nowhere near enough, and checks instead. That's where the belief that you can't charge a flush draw comes from. Not from the math being hard, but from doing it against the wrong card count.

A bet with chips behind it is buying one card. Price it against one card.

There's a rule underneath it that you can do at the table. With one card to come and forty-five cards that can arrive, a draw needs the pot times its number of outs, over forty-five less twice that number. Nine outs is the pot times nine over twenty-seven, which is a third of it. Fifteen outs is the pot times fifteen over fifteen, which is the whole pot.

What the levels do

The draws get bigger, and the bet needed to charge them grows much faster than they do. Level 1 is a fifth of the pot. By level 4 it's two thirds to four fifths of it, which is already a bet almost nobody makes. By level 5 it's past the pot and you won't have it. The stack runs out before the answer does, and the drill shows you what's behind so you can watch it happen. That's the real lesson at the top, and it isn't a failure of arithmetic. Some draws can't be charged at any price you're able to pay.

Past a certain size they can't be charged at all, by anybody. A hand that wins half the pot or more makes money from every chip that goes in, so there's no bet that prices it out. On one card that's about twenty-two outs, which is more than any real hand has. It's why the numbers run away so fast as you climb.

Pot Odds What the price is asking for

What it asks: Two things. What share of the time do you need to win for this call to break even, and is your hand worth that much?

Somebody bets and you have a draw. Calling costs money now and pays off later, and pot odds is the name for working out whether that trade is any good. It's the single most useful calculation in poker, and it's math a ten year old can do.

This is the only answer in the app with a price in chips, because it is the only one where you choose an action. A count and an estimate move no money, so neither has a cost.

How it works

Look at what you have to put in, and at what the pot will be worth once you've put it in. Your money as a share of that total is the share of the time you need to win. That's the whole thing.

An example

Saying it as a ratio

The price is often said as a ratio. Half pot lays you 3 to 1, meaning there are three units in there for every one you're adding. So you need to win 1 time in 4, which is 25%. Both ways of saying it are the same number.

What the levels do

Bet sizes get more awkward, so the math stops being quarters and thirds. From level 2 the seat is dealt with the cards, and on a flop it's being all in, rather than acting last, that buys both remaining cards: from either live seat your money buys the turn and nothing more. From level 3 up, some hands are dealt on the turn instead, where one card is all anybody is buying whatever seat they're in.

Equity Estimate What share of the pot you win

What it asks: Two hands, face up. What share of the pot is yours?

Equity is just a word for your share of the pot. Win a 200 pot 40% of the time and your equity is 40%, which is worth 80. Hands that tie count too, and a tie counts as half: two hands that always split have 50% each and neither ever wins outright. So the number this drill wants is your share of the pot, not how often you take the whole thing. It isn't really about math either. It's about calibration, getting your gut close enough to the truth that the answer you feel is the answer you'd have calculated.

How it works

You see two hands, and from level 3 a board as well, and you set a percentage. It starts at 50. Move it with the step keys, five at a time or one at a time, then lock it in. Before the flop there's nothing you can work out in your seat. Once there's a board, a hand that's drawing can count its outs and use the Rule of 2 and 4 from the other drills. On most of those spots that lands inside the band. Everywhere else you guess, the app tells you what it really is, and you do it again. After a few hundred of them your guesses get good, which is the only way anybody has ever learned this.

You're marked against a band rather than an exact figure. At level 1 your guess counts as right if it lands within 12 percentage points of the true figure, either side. The band tightens as you go: 10 at level 2, then 8, 6, and 4 at level 5.

An example

What the levels do

Levels 1 and 2 come before the board does. Some of the match-ups are the ones everybody quotes, aces against kings or a pair against two overcards. The rest are two hands off the top of the deck, king-five against suited ace-three, which nobody has a figure memorized for. Later levels put cards on the board, where the answer moves around a lot more, and the band you're marked against gets tighter at every step.

The Combinations How many of the hand you fear are left

What it asks: How many ways can they still have the hand you are afraid of?

Every range in poker is a list of card combinations underneath, and this is the drill that counts them. It asks for a count rather than a percentage, and a count is much harder to wave away. Tell a player their equity went up two points and they shrug. Tell them the six combinations of kings they were worried about are down to one, and they have something they can use at a table.

It comes before Against a Range because that drill's answer is built out of these counts rather than refined by them. Your share against a range is your share against each hand in it, weighted by how many ways that hand can be dealt. So the counting is the math underneath the average, not a footnote to it.

How it works

A pair is six combinations. Any two different ranks are sixteen: four of one by four of the other. Suited is four of those sixteen and offsuit is the other twelve. Those four numbers are the whole of what you have to know, and the drill is what happens to them once cards start coming off the deck.

Every card anybody can see is a card nobody can hold. That includes the five in the middle, which everybody subtracts because they're face up. It also includes the two in your own hand, which almost nobody subtracts at all.

A pair is six. Two ranks are sixteen. Every card you can see takes some of them away.

An example

Where the counting goes wrong

The other two are halves of the same subtraction. Taking the board off and forgetting your own hand is what nearly everybody does. The board is face up, and your cards feel like yours rather than like cards that are gone. Taking your own hand off and forgetting the board is rarer, and it's usually somebody who has just learned about blockers. The drill prints both under the answer, next to each other, so it's clear that neither is enough.

What the levels do

Level 1 puts the cards that come off in the middle, where the removal is face up. Level 2 puts them in your own hand instead: the same sum, and the cards come off from the place nobody looks. Both ask about a pair, a pair or better, or two ranks. A lone pair with one card gone is three every time, and a drill that is always three teaches the number rather than the count. Level 3 takes cards off from both places at once, on two ranks, so the count is a product with both removals in it. Level 4 asks about one suitedness only: four suited combinations rather than sixteen, so a single card you can see is a quarter of the answer.

Level 5 asks about every set the board allows rather than one of them. Nine is the number most players carry around, and it's right exactly when none of the three ranks is in your hand. When one of them is, it's seven. When two are, it's five. That's the same lesson as level 2 with the volume turned up: the hand you're afraid of is rarer than you think, and you're the reason.

Against a Range When you cannot see their cards

What it asks: What share of the pot is yours against everything they could be holding, instead of against two cards you were shown?

Nearly every drill here turns the other player's cards face up, which is the one thing a real table never does. The drill before this one stopped short of it, asking how many ways they could hold something without ever dealing it. This one goes the whole way. Instead of two cards you get a range, a written list of every hand they might have, and the answer is your average against all of them.

How it works

Ranges are written the way players say them. JJ+ means a pair of jacks, queens, kings or aces. AQs+ means suited ace-queen and every suited ace above it, which here is only suited ace-king. 99-66 means the pairs from nines down to sixes.

The answer is an average, and an average needs weights. Work out your equity against each hand in the range on its own, the way the equity drill does. Then weight every one of those answers by the number of ways that hand can be dealt, and divide by the total. Those counts are the drill before this one: a pair is six combinations, two ranks are sixteen, and every card you can see takes some of them away.

Four kinds of hand in a range isn't four numbers to average. It's four numbers, each counted as many times as it can be dealt.

That's what the counting was for: removal is what makes those weights uneven. A queen in your hand leaves three, so their queens drop from six ways to three, and some hands in the range are impossible before anything else happens. This drill puts the count on screen rather than asking for it, because here it's the input to the average rather than the answer.

So this drill is the other half of the one before it. Counting the combinations is how you get the weights, and averaging is what the weights are for. Skip the counting and you've averaged the hand types instead, which is a different sum with a different answer.

An example

What the levels do

Ranges get wider and harder to average through the first four levels, from a couple of dozen combinations at level 1 to several hundred at level 4. Level 5 moves to the turn instead: four cards on the board, a range that is usually narrow again, and one card left to come. The band you're marked against is two points wider than the equity drill at every level. Averaging a hundred hands is a coarser instrument than reading one off the table, and it would be unfair to mark the harder skill to the tighter standard.

The Extra Seat What another player costs you

What it asks: You know your share against each of them. What is it against all of them?

Every other drill in this app asks a question the cards answer exactly. This one asks a question the cards answer exactly, then hands you a rule of thumb to get there. It does that nowhere else except the Rule of 2 and 4. The reason is that there's no exact way to do this in your seat. Your share against a field of three is a number a computer enumerates and a person estimates.

Two things make it a drill rather than a shrug. The rule of thumb is a good deal better than it has any right to be, and it's two rules rather than one. Which of the two applies is decided by your own hand, and choosing wrong costs more than getting the arithmetic wrong.

How it works

You see two or three opponents, all face up, and your share against each of them on its own is printed for you. Those are the numbers Equity Estimate taught you to work out, and each of them is correct about a question nobody is asking. You set one percentage: your share against the whole field.

A hand you've already made multiplies. A hand you're drawing to barely discounts at all.

If you have a pair or better, multiply the shares together. You have to get past every one of them, and what they're holding has very little to do with each other, so the chances compound: two opponents you're 70% against is 49%, not 70%. If you're drawing, do almost nothing. Start from the smallest of the shares and take a point or two off. The card that saves you saves you against all of them at once. A second opponent is another hand beaten by the same card, not another way to lose.

The bands are wider than the equity drills use, and they're wider on purpose. Those drills mark an estimate and tighten as your calibration improves, which has no ceiling. This one marks a method that has an error of its own, so the band is set where the rule really lands: 8 points at levels 1, 2 and 4, and 10 at levels 3 and 5. No hand is dealt here where the rule falls outside its own band, so applying it correctly is always inside. At a table, where nothing picks the spots for you, it's inside about four times in five.

An example

Where the estimate goes wrong

The rule leans a little, and knowing which way is worth a point or two. Multiplying runs about three points low, because two opponents beating you aren't quite independent: the card that beats you often beats you in both their hands at once. The drawing rule runs about four points high, because sometimes two of them are drawing at the same card you are.

What the levels do

Levels 1 to 4 tell you which rule you need by dealing one shape at a time: a made hand against two, a draw against two, a made hand against three, a draw against three. Level 5 stops telling you. It deals either one, against three, and the first thing to work out on every hand is which of the two rules you're holding.

Multiway Your share against the whole field

What it asks: Three or four of you saw the flop. What is your share of the pot now?

Every other drill in this app deals you one opponent, because one opponent is what a question with an exact answer looks like. This one deals you two or three, which is what a home game actually deals. It asks the same question about a pot that several people are still in.

It gets a drill of its own because nobody estimates this by estimating it. They pick the opponent they're most worried about, work out their share against that one hand, and use the answer. That figure is real. It's just an answer to a different question, and it's always too high.

How it works

You don't beat the field by beating the hand you're afraid of. You beat it by beating all of them at once, and every extra seat is another way for the hand to be lost. Two opponents means the runout has to miss both of them. Three means it has to miss all three. And the shares of everybody at the table have to add up to a hundred, however strong your hand feels.

That's why the drop is so much steeper than it seems it should be. A hand that's a heavy favorite against any one of them can still be under half the pot against all three together. The pot is paying you on the second number.

Your share against the field is not your share against the scariest hand in it.

An example

Where the estimate goes wrong

The drill prints your share against each seat on its own once you've answered, next to the real number. The distance between them is the whole lesson, and it's much larger than anybody expects.

What the levels do

The ladder can't climb on arithmetic here. A share against three hands is no harder to estimate than a share against two, it's only smaller. So it climbs on the shape of the misreading instead. Level 1 gives you two opponents and a made hand that's ahead of both. That's the friendly case, where the heads-up figure feels safe and is still wrong. Level 2 gives you a draw, where counting outs stops being enough because there are now two hands to get past rather than one.

Level 3 puts one of them ahead of you, which is the case that catches people: the hand you instinctively price yourself against is the one you're not afraid of. Level 4 adds a third opponent. Level 5 gives you three of them while you're the one drawing. That's the family pot every home game deals, and the shape none of the other drills can show you.

Implied Odds What the call needs from later streets

What it asks: The price says fold. How much extra do you need to win later for calling to be right anyway?

Pot Odds prices a call against the money in the middle right now. On a flop, unless the bet puts somebody all in, that price only buys you one card. Price a flush draw against that one card and it says to fold to anything bigger than about a third of the pot. That's most of the bets anybody ever faces. Everybody calls anyway, and they're often right, because of the one thing that calculation leaves out: the money they pay you on the river, on the times your card does arrive. This drill asks for that money, in chips.

How it works

Work out what the call loses on the price alone, the way Pot Odds does. Then ask how often the card you need actually arrives. Divide the first by the second and you have the chips the river still has to bring.

What the call loses on average, divided by how often your card comes, is what the river has to bring.

An example

The number is the size of the ask, not a forecast. It assumes they pay you in full every time your card comes. It assumes you lose nothing more when it misses, and that a missed turn ends the hand. Real poker moves it both ways. They don't always pay, and a flush that arrives on the turn can still lose to a full house, which asks for more. But if you're last to act and the turn gets checked through, you see the river for nothing. And a draw that missed can still win the pot by betting it, which asks for less. Hold the figure against the chips behind. If there are nowhere near that many, no river was ever going to pay for this call.

What the levels do

Bets get bigger and stacks get shallower. At level 1 the river needs to bring a fraction of the pot, and every stack covers it. At level 5 it's usually somewhere between two and four times the pot, and the stack almost never covers it. That's the point of the whole drill: some calls aren't bad arithmetic, they're arithmetic that needs money nobody at the table has.

Fold Equity How often the shove has to work

What it asks: You are moving all in with a draw. How often do they have to fold for that to break even?

Most drills here leave the betting to somebody else. You count, you price, you estimate, and the chips going in are theirs. This is the other chair, and Charging the Draw is the other seat in it. You're the one putting the chips in, and the question is how often that has to take the pot down uncontested before it's worth doing. Fold equity is the name for the value you get from the times they give up.

How it works

It's the same fraction you already learned in Pot Odds, said from the other side: what you're risking, over what you're risking plus what you stand to win. The twist is what "what you're risking" means. With a hopeless hand you're risking the whole bet. With a draw you're not, because some of the time they call and you win anyway, and that cuts the risk down before you take the fraction.

An example

The figure everybody quotes

Shoving 40 into 60 with absolutely nothing needs to work 40% of the time, and that fraction is the number most players have heard. It moves with the size of the shove: half the pot has to work a third of the time, a pot sized shove half the time, twice the pot two thirds of the time. Here's the part almost nobody applies correctly.

Your hand doesn't come off the answer. It comes off what you're risking.

Your hand took the risk from 40 chips down to 21, and then the same division was done with that smaller number: 21 out of 81, rather than 40 out of 100. Subtracting your equity from 40% is not that calculation. On this hand the two land close, 26.6 against 26.1, which is why the habit survives. At level 5 they come apart: the subtraction says 34% where the shove needs 25%.

There's also a point past which the shove can't lose at all. In this spot it's 28.6%. A hand worth more than that makes money when they call, so no amount of folding is required and there's nothing left to work out. That line moves with the shove too: a quarter at half the pot, a third at a pot sized shove, higher again above that. A flush draw shoving half the pot into one pair or two pair is already past it. Against a set it sits on the line, a point either side of it depending on the cards, and that's the one hand most likely to be calling. The app shows you where the line is after every single hand. It's the most useful thing in the drill, and you won't meet it any other way.

What the levels do

The shove gets bigger and the hand behind it gets better, together. A big shove can't ask an interesting question unless there's a real draw behind it. As they climb, the figure everybody quotes gets further and further from the truth.

Playing the Hand What the price leaves out, street by street

What it asks: Play one hand to the river. What do you do on each street?

Every other drill in this app asks you for a number. This one asks what you do. It is the only place here where the answer is a line of play rather than a quantity, and that is not a change of style: a chip cost only exists once an answer has picked a line, which is why Pot Odds is the only other drill that prints one.

The opponent is face up twice over. Their cards, which most of these drills already show you, and their rule, which none of them did before. The rule is printed on the felt: they bet the same fraction of the pot on every street, and which fraction it is changes from hand to hand. With both of those on the table there is nothing left to read, and the whole hand can be worked out exactly rather than guessed at.

The one thing it teaches

The price of calling the flop is not the price the flop is offering you.

Calling a flop bet buys you two things the pot odds on that street know nothing about. It buys a turn card you are allowed to give up on cheaply, so your losses are capped by a fold you have not made yet. And it buys a share of a pot that two more bets will have grown before anybody shows a hand. Implied Odds teaches the second of those against one street and Charging the Draw teaches the first from the other chair. Here they both arrive at once, in the order the hand is actually played.

What replaces it is not another ratio. The hand is solved backwards: the river first, because nothing follows it, then the turn against the solved river, then the flop against the solved turn. At each step calling is worth the average of what the next card leads to, and the next card leads to whichever is better, playing on or folding. That last part is what the street price cannot see.

A hand worked through

The turn was the seven of clubs. It misses your six cards and hands you four more, because a six now makes you a straight. The drill asks the same question again into a pot of 180. The street price is still short, at 22.7% against the 33.3% it wants, and played out it is still a call. Then the river was the queen of spades, and there the answer turns over: nothing came, so calling costs the whole 540 and you fold. The right to walk away is what made the flop call work, and that is you using it.

The levels

Three things climb at once. How far the hand runs: one decision on the flop at level 1, the turn at level 2, the river from level 3 on. Whether a hand you should call is one the street price gets wrong, which levels 4 and 5 ask for every time and the first three do not. And how much they bet, which is what sets the price. Level 1 bets a third or a half of the pot, asking 20.0% or 25.0%. Level 5 bets one and a half times it or twice it, asking 37.5% or 40.0%. Every level deals two or three sizes rather than one. A level with a single bet size has a single price, and a price you meet on every hand is a number you remember instead of arithmetic you do. Half the hands at every level are folds, so the button is never the answer.

What this drill deals is held down by three others: Counting Outs, Pot Odds and Implied Odds. It never runs more than one rung ahead of the weakest of those, because a hand made of three skills cannot be a fair question before the skills are. That ceiling moves what you are dealt and never what you have earned, exactly as the free tier does.

Bad Runs How often a favorite loses anyway

What it asks: Play the same hand several times. How often does the whole run go badly?

Tilt is what this drill is about, and it's where the app gets its name. Every other question here is about one hand, and one hand isn't what ruins anybody's evening. Getting your money in as a big favorite and losing is a shrug. Getting it in as a big favorite four times and losing three of them is the thing that makes people throw their phone. Almost nobody has ever worked out how often that actually happens.

How it works

Each hand is the same spot dealt fresh, so the hands don't affect each other. The chance you win one is printed on the table, so the chance you lose one is whatever is left out of a hundred. Then you combine it, and the question comes in one of two shapes. Losing every single one is your losing chance multiplied by itself, once for each hand. Losing at least one is the other way about: work out how often you win them all, and take that off a hundred, because at least one loss is everything except a clean sweep.

An example

What the levels do

Levels 1 and 2 deal on the turn, with one card still to come, and ask about the two ends of a run: losing every single one, or losing at least one. Level 3 moves back to the flop, where two cards are still to come and more can go wrong. Levels 4 and 5 start asking about a threshold inside the run, like how often you lose two or more out of five. That is several outcomes added together rather than one step, which is exactly why it is worth having met before.