What is poker?
A card game with betting. Each hand is played for the pot: the chips everyone has been putting in the middle.
The pot is won two ways:
- Mostrando the best combination of cards at the end (that's called showdown).
- Not shown: everyone else folds first and the pot is yours.
That's why the player with the best cards doesn't always win: so does the one who gets everyone else to fold.
Here the chips aren't real and the opponents are bots with different styles (the one who calls everything, the aggressive one, the one who barely plays…). Making a mistake costs nothing.
Hand rankings
Your final hand is always 5 cards. From strongest to weakest:
The Ace plays high (A-K-Q-J-10) or low (5-4-3-2-A). Suits have no rank: none is worth more than another.
In this app each suit has its own color so you can read it quickly: ♠ black, ♥ red, ♦ blue, ♣ green. Dimmed cards aren't part of the combination.
How a hand runs
Before the deal, two players post forced bets: the small blind and the big blind. That way there's always something at stake.
Then everyone gets their private cards, and the hand moves through rounds. Each round has betting:
Preflop only your cardsFlop +3 on the boardTurn +1River +1Showdown
The cards on the table are comunitarias: everyone uses them to make their hand.
If in any round everyone but one folds, the hand ends there and that player takes the pot.
What you can do on your turn
- Check pass without betting, if nobody has bet yet.
- Bet put chips in first in that round.
- Call match what someone else bet.
- Raise match and increase the bet.
- Fold give up the hand. You lose what you've already put in, but nothing more.
- All-in bet all your chips.
If someone has already bet, you can't check: you have to call, raise or fold.
Position
At the table you'll see a chip with the letter D: it's the button. It marks who deals and moves one seat each hand.
From the flop on, the button acts last: sees what everyone did before deciding. That information is worth a lot.
- BTN the button: the best position.
- CO the seat before the button (cutoff): also good.
- UTG first to act before the flop: the hardest.
- SB · BB the blinds: they've already put chips in, but after the flop they act first.
Rule of thumb: the later you act, the more hands you can play. From early positions, only the best.
Hold'em and Omaha
Hold'em (NLHE): you get 2 cards. You make your hand from any combination of your 2 and the 5 on the board. No-limit: you can bet everything at any time.
Omaha (PLO5, PLO6): you get 5 or 6 cards. The golden rule:
You use exactly 2 cards from your hand and exactly 3 from the board. Not one more, not one less.
Board
Your hand
There are 4 hearts on the board and you have the A♥… but you don't have a flush: you can only use 3 cards from the board, so you need dos hearts in your hand.
Pot limit (the P in PLO): the most you can bet is the size of the pot.
In Omaha the winning hands are stronger than in Hold'em. A pair or two pair often isn't enough.
Chips, bb and the table
- bb the big blind. We measure everything in bb to compare tables of different value. At a 5,000/10,000 table, 1 bb = 10,000; winning 50 bb is 500,000.
- Stack the chips you have in front of you.
- Pot what's in the middle.
- Straddle a voluntary blind bet, before seeing cards, that grows the pot. If it comes from the button it's called Mississippi.
- Bomb pot special hand: everyone puts in the same amount and it goes straight to the flop. Sometimes with two boards at once; the pot is split between the two.
The advisor's vocabulary
- Equity what percentage of the time your hand would win if all the cards were shown now.
- "You need X%" how much you need to win for calling to be worth it (pot odds).
EjemploThere's 100 in the pot and someone bets 50. To continue you call 50 and can win 200 (100 + 50 + your 50). You need to win at least 50 out of every 200: 25%. If your equity is higher, calling wins money in the long run.
- Outs the cards still to come that improve you.
- Nuts the best possible hand with that board.
- SPR your stack divided by the pot. Low (under 3): with a good hand, you normally go all-in. High: careful.
- Suited two cards of the same suit in your hand. Doble suited: two pairs of suits (A♠K♠ Q♥J♥).
How to study here
- Drills: only the preflop decision. It tells you instantly whether you got it right. Start here.
- Academy: you play the full hand and the advisor shows you what it would do and why.
- Solo: you play without help and at the end you see the Contrast: which decisions you matched the advisor on.
Short, focused sessions (20 to 30 hands) pay off more than hours on autopilot. Switch modes in the ☰ menu → Mode.
The advisor calculates probabilities: it's a guide, not an oracle, and sometimes it's wrong. And this beta version doesn't save your sessions: when you close it, they're deleted.