Neat online tools to improve your poker skills
Let’s say you’re interested in learning how to play poker, a newbie in poker, or a long-time player still looking to make a sizable earning from your game — the fact is that you never stop learning. Not even the champs and hall of famers have stopped learning how to improve their strategy.
So if you are serious about poker, we suggest you design your poker training program so you can test and measure your improvement.
The best poker training sites
Online poker training sites are an excellent place to begin your poker level-up journey.
PokerNerve is the brainchild of professional poker player Kelvin Beattie. He has been a professional poker player for more than a decade and has made over USD $3,000,000 in winnings.
With PokerNerve, you go through a course Beattie designed: The Road to Success MTT (multi-table tournament) Poker Course. It promises to train you from being a beginner to an expert player.
It is organized like a course you go through in school. You need to study and pass each course before you can sign up for the next one. PokerNerve is beginner-friendly with over 80 hours of poker training videos to learn from. Best of all, it offers a 7-day trial.
Tournament Poker Edge — in contrast to PokerNerve — is more traditional. Unlike PokerNerve where you go through an organized course, Tournament Poker Edge produces poker coaching videos in no particular sequence. They are deemed as “top-notch” and can be streamed or downloaded.
Poker Edge has been around since 2010 and has produced some of the best MTT players today.
Enjoy interacting with the pros in their member forum (we heard they are very active!).
Upswing Poker was designed by Texas hold ’em trainers Doug Polk and Ryan Fee. Polk is a former professional poker player who shone in heads-up No Limit Hold’em. Fee is an online poker professional known for being aggressive yet entertaining.
Their Upswing Poker Lab is a No-Limit Hold’em course that gets updated with new in-depth theory modules every month, one of the reasons why they are getting great reviews. The Upswing Poker Lab’s membership starts at $7.
There is only one thing you should know before you sign up: the basic rules of the game.
Once you sign up, you get access to their hand range viewer, where you will learn to rate poker hands. The downside: the Lab does not provide advanced poker training to help you specialize in a particular kind of game. You may need to look for further training someplace else.
WSOP Training Academy is an online interactive poker school launched in 2010. It is the official poker school of the World Series of Poker, a series of annual poker tournaments in Las Vegas.
WSOP Training Academy is for casual and novice players, intended to help increase their interest and love for the game. The website features actual footage from WSOP, instructions from poker champions, and an interactive interface meant to make the experience enjoyable and easy to follow.
“We teach players with real hands from real tournaments with exclusive WSOP content, giving them our first-hand view of every flop, turn, and river,” says 15-time WSOP champion Phil Hellmuth. “This is the place where the next generation will learn to become champions.”
Cardplayer is a poker hand analysis tool from the publishers of the magazine of the same name. They believe that, with poker, “the idea is that it is easier to get where you want to go if you know where you are going — and why.” Publisher Barry Shulman’s goal is to increase the poker IQ score of every player.
On their website, you are immediately welcomed by a Texas Hold’em Poker Odds Calculator. It is an online poker simulator that enables you to run different scenarios that occur at the poker table. “See your odds and outs, and cover the math of winning and losing poker hands,” it says.
You can do this with Texas Hold’em, Omaha, Seven-Card Stud, Razz, Deuce-To-Seven.
More tools for you
Aside from these websites, here are other places to go to enhance your poker training, experience, strategy, and confidence for your next game:
- Hold’em poker quiz: funtrivia.com
How well can you play scenarios in your head so you can make the best decisions when you are in the actual game? Take the quiz to find out.
- Advanced poker quiz: (Quiz) Can You Crush Like OtB_RedBaron?
This is a 10-question quiz found on Upswing Poker to see if you can play online No-Limit Texas Hold’em like Jonas Mols of Belgium. He is more popularly known as OtB_RedBaron.
- Free interactive poker games: fulltilt.com
Full Tilt’s free online poker games are for everyone — from beginners to experts. You won’t have to shell out any money and can be there just to have fun. Once you are ready to play them more seriously, you can choose to play them with real money.
- Free poker coaching videos: pokervip.com
Want to see how the best online pokers around the world play? Pokervip.com has forty pages or over 600 free coaching videos for you to watch, enjoy, and learn from. Some coach you, some review their games for you, and some share their strategies with you.
