PLO Tutor
A Pot-Limit Omaha coach, not a card game
Four cards, and only two of them count. You play real hands against opponents who get harder as you do, and afterwards something tells you which decision cost you money — and stays quiet when it cannot tell.
Pot-Limit Omaha is the game hold’em players move to when they want more action, and most of them lose at it for the same few reasons: they play four cards as if they were two, they fall in love with hands that are not the best possible hand, and they draw to flushes and straights that somebody else already has bigger. PLO Tutor is built around exactly those habits.
What it does
You play real hands, nine-handed, against eight opponents whose difficulty rises as you improve. The rules are the real ones: four cards each, exactly two of them used with three from the middle, and no bet or raise bigger than the pot. After a hand where something went wrong, the coach tells you which decision cost money and what it would have done instead. After a hand you played well, it says nothing at all — stopping somebody to tell them they did nothing wrong costs attention and teaches nothing.
Over a few hundred hands it works out which mistakes are habits rather than accidents, ranks them by what each is costing you, and turns any one of them into a focused set of hands that puts you in that exact situation until you stop getting it wrong. Then it checks back days later to see whether the fix held, because assuming it did is how coaching quietly stops working.
What makes it a PLO coach
It knows what the best possible hand is. On every board the app works out how many holdings beat yours, so it can tell you that your flush was the third-best flush available, or that your two pair was never going to be good against a bet that size. In this game that one fact is most of the strategy, and the coach is built on it.
It counts your outs properly. Instead of the old rule of thumb, it puts every unseen card on the board and counts which ones make you a hand — and, separately, which ones make you the best hand. A draw with thirteen cards to a hand that loses anyway is named for what it is.
It watches for the habits that lose at this game. Playing hands whose cards do not work together. Paying off big bets with second-best hands. Drawing to second-best hands. Betting the flop with nothing after raising. Putting the stack in too light when the pot is already large. Twenty-two habits in all, each explained in plain English and each turned into practice on request.
What makes it different
It stays quiet when it is not sure. The coach will not name a habit until it has watched enough of the same situation to be confident, and every bar it uses was set by measuring a scripted flawless player against a scripted flawed one, at this app’s own tables. One of the twenty-two habits cannot yet be told apart from sound play that way, so the app refuses to name it.
It does not flatter you. Where it cannot work out what a mistake has cost, it says the cost is not known rather than printing a zero. Small samples are labelled as small samples. Hands played in a drill are kept out of your real numbers, because an arranged table would flatter or punish them without either being true.
It explains itself in English. Every unavoidable poker word — the nuts, a wrap, a dangler, double-suited — is tappable and defined in a sentence. Seats are numbered, with a diagram, rather than expecting you to already know what “under the gun” means.
It teaches the things nobody says out loud. A short course covers why four cards are not two, why the best possible hand is what you are playing for, which hands to come in with, how pot-limit betting works and what the Pot button does, what price a bet is offering you, how to count a draw, why one pair and two pair are weak here, and what to do when your stack is small next to the pot — each with the arithmetic worked through.
What it is not
There is no real money gambling in PLO Tutor and no way to put any in. Nothing is wagered, chips cannot be bought, and no chip has any value outside the app. It is a coaching tool that happens to use a poker table, in the way a driving instructor uses a car.
It is also not a solver. The coach is a heuristic evaluator that deliberately holds its tongue on close decisions, because false alarms destroy trust in a coach faster than missed mistakes do.
Your hands stay on your phone
Every hand you play is written to a plain text file on your own device. Nothing is uploaded, there is no account, there are no analytics, and nobody — including us — can see a hand you have played. The file is readable text on purpose: a tool whose whole job is being honest about your game should let you check its working.
Help and support
Something broken, something wrong, or a question the app does not answer: ken@thedigitaladlab.com. A real person reads it. If you are reporting something that went wrong, the version number is at the bottom of the More screen and saying what you were doing at the time is usually enough to find it.
Is this the same app as Poker Tutor?
No. Poker Tutor coaches Texas hold’em. PLO Tutor is a separate app for Pot-Limit Omaha, with its own opponents, its own habits and its own history. The two do not share anything, so what one has learned about your game does not carry to the other — a hold’em habit and an Omaha habit are different things.
The coach said nothing about a hand I played badly
That is deliberate. It stays quiet on close decisions, and it will not call something a habit until it has seen enough of the same situation to be sure — usually a couple of hundred hands. A quiet coach early on is the app being honest about what it can and cannot tell yet, rather than a fault.
My rating has not moved
Under two hundred hands the rating is deliberately held near the middle and labelled as still settling, because a rating built on a handful of hands is a number about nobody. It firms up as you play.
How do I start again from scratch?
More → Start over. It throws away every saved hand, resets your rating, returns you to the first table on the ladder and cancels any practice checks that were waiting. The previous file is set aside on the device rather than deleted, in case it was a mistake.
Where are my hands kept, and how do I delete them?
In a plain text file on your own device, and nowhere else. “Start over” clears them; deleting the app removes everything. Nothing was ever sent anywhere, so there is no request to make of us and nothing for us to delete on your behalf.
Is there real money in this?
Nothing is wagered and no chip has any value outside the app. There is no way to buy chips and no way to cash anything out.
What does it cost?
Your first 300 hands are free, and so is the assessment that produces your first scorecard. After that PLO Tutor is a subscription, and that is the only thing there is to buy — it removes the limit on how many hands you can play and buys nothing inside the game itself. It costs $9.99 a year and renews every year until you cancel, which you can do any time in your Apple Account settings. Everything you have already played stays yours either way: your hands, your numbers and the coach’s write-ups do not go anywhere if you decide not to subscribe.