Open any poker forum and you’ll find the same question every week: what should I study, and what’s free? Ten years ago the answer was “pay for coaching or figure it out alone”. Today you can get preflop charts, an equity calculator and a small taste of solver output without spending a cent, then test what you’ve learned at a site like BC Poker.
The problem now is the opposite one. There’s so much free stuff that people download six apps, use each for three days and go back to playing on feel. Here’s a shorter route.
Before You Download Anything
“Free” covers three very different things. Some tools cost nothing, full stop. Some give you a stripped-down version and keep the good parts behind a subscription. And some are trials that disappear after a week. Worth checking which is which, because a trial won’t help you build a habit.
Limits change all the time, so read the terms on each site yourself. Also, one thing to settle now: these tools are for before and after a session. Using any of them during a hand counts as real-time assistance, and the big poker sites ban it. Lose your account over that and no study plan in the world will save you.
Preflop First. Always.
If you can only fix one street, make it this one. Same decisions come up every single session: what to open from which seat, what to call, what to throw away. Get those right and you stop leaking chips before the flop even arrives.
Upswing Poker’s Preflop Prodigy is a free browser tool for this, and other training sites have similar ones. Read the chart, then switch to a trainer that quizzes you. You want the right answer to show up without you thinking about it.
But don’t just memorise the colours. Ask yourself why A-9 offsuit is a fold under the gun and a fine open on the button. Seat, stack depth and who’s left to act all change the answer, and a chart made for one format can steer you wrong in another.
Equilab: Five Minutes After Every Session
An equity calculator tells you how often one hand beats another hand, or a whole range of hands. Equilab is the free one people usually start with.
Here’s how I’d use it. You called a river bet with a pair of tens and you’re not sure you were ahead. Type in your hand, give the opponent a range that seems realistic and look at the number. It’s usually not the one you expected. Do that for five minutes after a session and your gut feeling about hand strength gets better quickly, because you’re checking it against something real.
The Solver Trap
A solver works out a strategy for one exact spot. The full programs mostly cost money, though some platforms let you try a limited version. GTO Wizard is the best known. Its free access is restricted, but it’s enough to see what solver output looks like and to run a few drills. Limits shift, so check the site.
Use it as a sample, nothing more. A solver tells you what to do against a very strong opponent, and the player across from you at the low stakes probably isn’t one. So don’t copy the frequencies. Try to see why a hand sometimes bets and sometimes checks, which spots have an obvious answer and which are so close it hardly matters. Then ask what you’d change against the actual person in seat four.
Drill Apps and the Ten-Minute Rule
Plenty of free apps serve up one decision at a time: a preflop spot, a postflop spot, a quick odds question. A lot of them cap the number of hands you get per day.
Honestly, the cap helps. Ten or fifteen minutes every day beats a four-hour session on Sunday that you skip the next two weekends. Small and boring wins here.
Video: One Coach, Not Six
Free articles and videos are still the best way to learn ideas that need explaining. Upswing Poker and GTO Wizard both put out free material. Pick one and stay with it for a few weeks.
Choose one topic, defending the big blind for example, and watch three or four pieces on it in the same week. Hopping between random videos feels productive. A month later you can’t tell anyone what you learned.
Your Own Hand History
All of the above works better when you aim it at hands you actually played. Most poker rooms save your hand histories, and a few free or cheap tools will replay them for you.
Keep the job small. During a session, mark the hands that bothered you. Afterwards, go through five to ten. A chart or a calculator means a lot more when it answers a question you really had at the table.
Why People Stall
You’ve probably met someone who owns every tool and plays the same as last year. Software was never the issue. They study a topic for a day and move on, they skip sessions for weeks, they never write down a mistake, and they judge a decision by whether they won the pot. Luck ends up steering every conclusion.
Then there are the traps. Switching apps every week. Memorising answers without the reasoning, which falls apart the first time a spot looks slightly different. Spending hours on theory and barely playing, so none of it gets tested. And chasing solver-perfect play when the opponents at your stakes hand out easier money long before that matters.
A Realistic Week
Nothing fancy, and it fits around a job:
- Two drill sessions, ten to fifteen minutes each.
- One review: replay five hands you struggled with, and use the calculator if it helps.
- One study session on a single idea from a free video or article.
- Table time on poker-bc.com with one specific thing to try, then a quick note on how it went.
That’s a few hours a week, and it covers practice, review, learning and actually playing.
Where to Start
Pick one chart trainer, one equity calculator and one drill app. Run the weekly plan for a month. If a tool hasn’t earned its spot by then, drop it. A small kit you use every week is worth more than a folder of bookmarks you never open.
