Blog
Strategy, math and a cool head. Ideas to play better without risking a cent.
How to Analyze a Poker Hand You Lost (and Why Reviewing It Alone Isn't Enough)
Paste the hand history, the engine computes your equity and the price on every street, and you know exactly where the hand went wrong. Then comes the hard part: understanding why. That's what the coach is for.
July 25, 2026
Poker Bots: Why They're Cheating, How Sites Catch Them, and What You Can Actually Learn From Them
A bot that plays for you with real money isn't a shortcut, it's cheating, and sites hunt down the ones they can. Here's why it's fraud, the real techniques used to detect it, and the one thing that's genuinely worth taking from them.
July 22, 2026
HUDs Are Banned on GGPoker: How to Study Poker Without a Tracker
PokerTracker and Holdem Manager were the standard for fifteen years, but GGPoker bans them, partypoker killed hand histories in 2019 and the list keeps growing. The good news: what actually made you win never lived in the HUD, and you can train it away from the table.
July 21, 2026
Poker on the Mississippi riverboats: what's documented and what isn't
The first hand of poker anyone wrote down was a cheat that misfired. Almost everything else repeated about the river gamblers traces back to a single self-published book. A walk through the primary sources.
July 21, 2026
Can a Bot Win at Poker? What We Learned From Libratus and Pluribus
Two machines have already beaten the best players in the world: Libratus in 2017 and Pluribus in 2019. They didn't do it with tricks, but with balance and math. Here's how they pulled it off and what you can steal for your own game.
July 20, 2026
Card values in poker (and where the suits and face cards come from)
The ace is the highest card, not the lowest, though it also knows how to play low. Here's the full order, why suits almost never break ties, where the king, queen and jack came from, and what else you can play with the same deck.
July 20, 2026
How to Calculate Poker Equity, Step by Step
Equity is your percentage chance of winning a hand before the remaining cards come. Here's how to estimate it in your head with the rule of 2 and 4, read it hand versus hand, and — the part that actually matters — work it out against a range.
July 19, 2026
Is Poker Luck or Skill? What the Data Says
The short answer: both, but on different timescales. In the short run luck rules, which is why a beginner can beat you on any given night. In the long run skill turns the same names into winners. The numbers explain it.
July 17, 2026
Poker and Brain Health: The Cognitive Benefits of Playing With Your Head
Poker is a gym for the brain: it trains decision-making under uncertainty, working memory, emotional control and probabilistic thinking. What the science actually says, and how to train it without risking a cent.
July 16, 2026
Poker Hand Rankings: Best to Worst (With Real Probabilities)
All 10 poker hands ranked best to worst, with the exact odds of being dealt each one. Royal flush, flush, full house, two pair… the complete hierarchy explained with numbers, not clichés.
July 16, 2026