Poker Tutor
A coach, not a card game
You play real hands against opponents who get harder as you do. Afterwards, something tells you which decision cost you money — and stays quiet when it cannot tell.
Most poker software is built for people who are already good. It assumes you know what a continuation bet is, that you size a bet as a share of the pot, and that the seat you are in matters more than the cards you hold. Poker Tutor assumes none of that, and says so out loud.
What it does
You play real hands against eight opponents whose difficulty rises as you improve. 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 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. Six of the eighteen habits it tracks were found, during development, to be capable of accusing a player who had done nothing wrong. All six were re-derived from measured data. One of them cannot be judged honestly at all, so the app refuses to judge 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. No ranges, no fold equity, no being told you were "out of position". Every unavoidable poker word is tappable and defined in a sentence. Seats are numbered — the small blind is 1 and the dealer is last — 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 how much to bet, what price a bet is offering you, how much to raise before the flop, why where you sit beats what you hold, and which hands to come in with from where — each with the arithmetic worked through, and most of them practisable on the spot.
What it is not
There is no real money in Poker Tutor and no way to put any in. Nothing is wagered, nothing is purchased, 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.
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?
No. Nothing is wagered, nothing is purchased, there are no in-app purchases and no chip has any value outside the app.