How the drills work
Eight drills, explained in plain English. No background needed beyond knowing the rules of Texas Hold'em. If a word here is new to you, it is explained the first time it appears, and there is a list of all of them at the bottom.
Before the drills
Every drill works the same way. You are shown a hand, usually with your opponent's cards face up, and asked one question about it. You answer, and the app tells you the real number and where it came from. A sitting is ten questions.
Your opponent's cards being face up is the thing to notice. At a table they are not, and one of the drills fixes exactly that. The other seven show them because most of these questions only have an exact answer when you know what you are up against, and being marked against an exact answer is the point. You learn the arithmetic first and take the guessing to the table afterwards.
Each drill has five levels. Get four of your last five right and you move up; get most of them wrong and you move back down. Level 1 is the clean version of the question, level 5 is the version with everything in it at once.
Nothing here is a lookup table. Every answer is worked out by playing the hand out against a real hand evaluator, usually every single way the remaining cards can come, so the number you are shown is the number, not an approximation somebody typed in.
The eight drills
- Counting OutsHow many cards win it
- Outs Against YouHow many cards take it away
- Pot OddsWhat the price is asking for
- Equity EstimateHow often you win
- Against a RangeWhen you cannot see their cards
- Bad RunsHow often a favorite loses anyway
- Implied OddsWhat the call needs from later streets
- Fold EquityHow often the shove has to work
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 everything else is built on. You are behind, there are cards to come, and before you can work out whether a call is worth making you have to know how many cards save you. A card that would put you in front is called an out, and counting them is a skill you can learn in an afternoon and use forever.
How it works
There are 52 cards. You can see five of them: your two and the three on the board. That leaves 47 you cannot see, and somewhere in those 47 are the cards that win it for you. Your job is to count them.
The counting is not quite as simple as it looks, which is why it is 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 cannot come at all, so it does not count either.
An example
You: 7h 6h Them: As Kd Board: Ah Kh 2c
They have two pair. You have four hearts and need a fifth. There are 13 hearts in a deck and you can see four of them, so nine are left.
With two cards still to come, one of those nine arrives about 35% of the time.
Nine outs
The shortcut
Multiply your outs by 2 for one card to come, or by 4 for two. Nine outs times four is 36%, and the real answer above is 34.97%. Close enough to use at a table, and the drill shows you both so you learn where the shortcut drifts.
What the levels do
Level 1 is one clean draw. Level 2 adds a second kind of draw in the same hand, so you are counting two groups without double counting the cards in both. Level 3 starts holding some of your outs in the other player's hand. Levels 4 and 5 stop protecting you from anything, including hands where the honest answer is zero.
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, because 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 was not. It was a number you could have known.
How it works
Exactly like counting your own outs, except you are counting theirs. The trap is different though: from this side, the cards you forget to subtract are the ones in their hand, and forgetting them makes the danger look bigger than it is.
An example
You: Jh Jc Them: As Kd Board: Th 7s 3c
Your jacks are in front. Any ace or any king puts them in front instead. Four aces and four kings is eight cards, and eight is wrong: they are holding one of each, so only three aces and three kings are left.
Your jacks survive to the end 75.25% of the time.
Six cards beat you
That survival figure is not worked out by subtracting. The app deals out every possible way the last two cards can come and counts the ones you win, because the two answers are not 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 you are counting into their hand. Level 4 deals 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.
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 the hand you are holding 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 the trade is any good. It is the single most useful calculation in poker and it is arithmetic a ten year old can do.
How it works
Look at what you have to put in, and at what the pot will be worth once you have put it in. Your money as a share of that total is the share of the time you need to win. That is the whole thing.
An example
You: 7h 6h Them: As Kd Board: Ah Kh 2c
There is 100 in the pot and they bet 50.
Calling costs you 50. If you call, the pot is 100 plus their 50 plus your 50, which is 200. Your 50 is a quarter of 200.
Now the hand. This bet puts you all in, so both remaining cards come and nobody can bet again. Your nine hearts are worth 33.1% here. 33 is more than 25, so calling makes money. Call.
You need to win 25% of the time
The shortcut
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 are 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 arithmetic stops being quarters and thirds. The seat changes too, which changes how many cards your money is actually buying.
Equity Estimate How often you win
What it asks: Two hands, face up. What percentage of the time does yours win?
Equity is just a word for your share of the pot: if you win a 200 pot 40% of the time, your equity is 40%, and your share is worth 80. This drill is not really about arithmetic. It is about calibration, getting your gut close enough to the truth that the answer you feel is the answer you would have calculated.
How it works
You are shown two hands and you type a percentage. There is no formula to apply. 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 are marked against a band rather than an exact figure, and the band tightens as you go: 12 points at level 1, then 10, 8, 6, and 4 at level 5.
An example
You: As Ks Them: Qh Qd No board yet
Almost everybody calls this a coin flip. It is not quite: the pair is ahead, and not by much.
Knowing it is 46 and not 50 is worth real money over a year, and the only way to know it is to have guessed at it enough times to be calibrated.
Ace-king suited wins 46.21% of the time
What the levels do
Levels 1 and 2 are before any cards come, where the match-ups are the familiar ones. Later levels put cards on the board, where the answer moves around a lot more, and the band you are marked against gets tighter at every step.
Against a Range When you cannot see their cards
What it asks: How often do you win against everything they could be holding, rather than against two cards you were shown?
Every other drill here turns the other player's cards face up, which is the one thing a real table never does. This is the drill that fixes it. Instead of two cards you get a range, which is a written description 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 jacks, queens, kings or aces. AQs+ means suited ace-queen or better. 99-66 means the pairs from nines down to sixes.
The part everybody skips is that your own cards remove some of theirs. If you are holding a queen, they cannot be holding all four, so some of the hands in their range are impossible before anything else happens. The drill puts that count on screen because it changes the answer and nobody does it in their head.
An example
You: Ac Qd Board: Qh 8s 3c Them: JJ+
You have top pair with the best possible kicker, which feels strong. Their range is jacks, queens, kings and aces. On paper that is 24 combinations of cards, but you are holding a queen and the board has another, so only 16 combinations are actually left.
Top pair with the best kicker is behind here, not ahead.
You win 42.8% of the time
What the levels do
Ranges get wider and harder to average. The band you are marked against is two points wider than the equity drill at every level, because 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.
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 is where the app gets its name. Every other question here is about one hand, and one hand is not 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, and 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 do not 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
You: 9c 9d Them: Ah Kh Board: 9h 5h 2c 7s
You have three nines. They have four hearts and need a fifth, with one card to come. Nine hearts are left, but two of them would pair the board and fill your nines into a full house instead, so only seven cards actually beat you. You win 84% of the time and lose 16%.
Now play it twice. Losing both is 16% of 16%, which the app rounds to 2.6%. That is about one run of two in 38, and you meet more than one such run in an evening. Rare, and not rare enough that it will never be you.
Losing both happens 2.6% of the time
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, as in how often you lose two or more out of five, which is several outcomes added together rather than one step, and which is exactly why it is worth having met before.
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, and 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, which is most of the bets anybody ever faces. Everybody calls anyway, and they are 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
You: 9h 8h Them: Ac Qd Board: Ah Qh 3c
There is 100 in the pot, they bet 50, and you both have plenty of chips behind.
Same price as before: you need to win 25% of the time. But you are not all in this time, so your 50 only buys the turn card, and over that single card your flush draw is worth 20%. Not enough. Calling loses money.
How much? On average the call loses 10 chips: one time in five your heart comes and you take the 150 already out there, and the other four times you lose the 50 you put in. Your card comes 20% of the time, so the money that has to arrive on the river is 10 divided by 0.20.
There is 400 behind, so 50 is easily there if they pay you. This call is fine, and now you know why rather than just feeling it.
The river has to bring 50 more chips
The number is the size of the ask, not a forecast. It assumes they pay you in full every time your card comes, that you lose nothing more when it misses, and that a missed turn is the end of the hand. Real poker moves it both ways. They do not always pay, and a flush that arrives on the turn can still lose to a full house, which asks for more. But if you are 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 is usually somewhere between two and four times the pot, and the stack almost never covers it, which is the point of the whole drill: some calls are not bad arithmetic, they are 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?
Every other drill here leaves the betting to somebody else: you count, you price, you estimate, and the chips going in are theirs. This is the other chair. You are the one putting the chips in, and the question is how often that has to take the pot down uncontested before it is worth doing. Fold equity is the name for the value you get from the times they give up.
How it works
It is the same fraction you already learned in Pot Odds, said from the other side: what you are risking, over what you are risking plus what you stand to win. The twist is what "what you are risking" means. With a hopeless hand you are risking the whole bet. With a draw you are 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
You: Ac 4d Them: 9h 8s Board: 9c 6d 2h
There is 60 in the pot and you move all in for 40.
If they fold, you win 60. If they call, the pot is 140, you have put 40 of it in, and you win 13.4% of the time. That is the whole of it and not just the aces: an ace that comes with a nine or an eight behind it still loses, and a three and a five together make you a straight without one. Work that out and being called costs you 21 chips on average.
So the shove, which is just what players call an all in bet, is really risking 21 to win the 60 that is already there. 21 out of 81 is the answer.
They need to fold 26% of the time
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 is the part almost nobody applies correctly.
Your hand does not come off the answer. It comes off what you are 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 is also a point past which the shove cannot lose at all. In this spot it is 28.6%: a hand worth more than that makes money when they call, so no amount of folding is required and there is nothing left to work out. That line moves with the shove too, a quarter at half the pot and 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 is the one hand most likely to be calling. The app shows you where the line is after every single hand, because it is the most useful thing in the drill and you will not meet it any other way.
What the levels do
The shove gets bigger and the hand behind it gets better, together, because a big shove cannot ask an interesting question unless there is a real draw behind it. As they climb, the figure everybody quotes gets further and further from the truth.
Words you will meet
Every one of these is used somewhere above. None of them is complicated once somebody says it plainly, and all of them are in the app too: any term underlined in the drills opens its own explanation.
- The board
- The shared cards in the middle. Three on the flop, a fourth on the turn, a fifth on the river.
- An out
- A card still to come that would put you in front. Nine hearts left means nine outs to a flush.
- A draw
- A hand that is not good yet but would be if the right card comes. A flush draw is four of one suit needing a fifth. An open-ended straight draw is four in a row, which two different ranks can complete. A gutshot is missing a card in the middle, so only one rank fills it.
- Equity
- Your share of the pot, written as a percentage. If you win a 200 pot 40% of the time, your equity is 40% and your share is worth 80.
- Pot odds
- What the price on the table is asking for. Your call as a share of the pot it creates, which is the share of the time you need to win for the call to break even.
- Implied odds
- The money you expect to win on later cards when your draw comes in. It is the part the pot odds calculation leaves out, and it is why calls that look wrong are often right.
- Fold equity
- The value you get from the times your opponent gives up rather than the times you win at showdown.
- Break even
- The point where a decision neither makes nor loses money over the long run. Most of the answers in this app are the break-even point, because that is the line a real decision is either side of.
- All in
- Betting the last of your chips. It matters to the arithmetic because once you are all in nobody can bet again, so every remaining card comes and the hand is settled.
- A blocker
- A card you were counting on that somebody else is holding. If they have an ace, only three are left, and your count of outs was one too high.
- A range
- Every hand somebody could be holding, written down. JJ+ is jacks or better, AQs+ is suited ace-queen or better.
- Card removal
- The fact that your own cards, and the board, make some of their possible hands impossible. It shrinks their range before anything else happens, and almost nobody does it in their head.
- A runout
- One particular way the remaining cards could come. The app usually plays out every single one.
- A chop
- A hand where nobody wins and the pot is split.
- A favorite
- The hand that is ahead. Being a favorite is not the same as being safe: an 80% favorite loses one time in five, and that is the whole subject of Bad Runs.
- The Rule of 2 and 4
- The shortcut for turning outs into a percentage. Multiply by 2 for one card to come, by 4 for two. It is close, not exact, and the app shows you both so you learn where it drifts.
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