Poker Tutor Cash
A cash-game hold’em coach, not a card game
Pick your stakes and your limit, sit down with a hundred big blinds, keep what you win. You play real hands against opponents who get harder as the stakes rise, and afterwards something tells you which decision cost you money — and stays quiet when it cannot tell.
A cash game is a different game from a tournament. Nobody is forced to move, the blinds never rise, and there is a hundred big blinds in front of everybody — so the expensive mistakes are not about when the stack has to go in but about what the money behind is worth, and about putting a stack in at all with the wrong hand. And a hold’em cash game comes in three shapes: fixed-limit, where every bet is the same size; pot-limit, where the pot is the most you can bet; and no-limit. Poker Tutor Cash coaches all three, and it coaches each one as the game it is.
What it does
You choose the stakes — 25/50 up to 500/1000 — and the limit, and sit down with a hundred big blinds at a nine-handed table. Stacks carry from hand to hand the way they do at a real table. If you bust, you buy back in and it is counted. When you have had enough you cash out, and the session’s result is shown the way cash players keep score: big blinds won or lost, and big blinds for every hundred hands.
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 per hundred hands, 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.
What makes it a cash-game coach
It prices the money behind. Deep, a call to hit a set or a draw is often worth making even when the pot alone does not pay for it, because of what is left to win when it gets there. The coach works that out, and it names the fold that gave up a hand the stacks paid to see — and the call that chased one they did not.
It knows what one pair is worth. A hundred big blinds is a lot to put in with one pair. The coach watches for the stack that went in with top pair against a hand that was only ever going to be better.
It coaches fixed-limit as fixed-limit. When every bet is the same size, the price is nearly always right to draw, the money is made by raising for value and for free cards, and the expensive habit is folding the river. The coach judges those things — whether the price paid you to call, whether you raised when you were probably best, whether you called down or gave up — with its own set of habits and its own lessons, because a limit game is not a small no-limit one.
And everything the tournament coach knows. Which hands to play from which seat, what price a bet is offering you, when a call is paying somebody off, when a check is leaving money behind — the habits that lose at hold’em whatever the format.
A ladder of stakes
The tables get harder as the stakes go up, and the app tells you when the next stake is earned: play well enough at 50/100 over a few hundred hands and it says 100/200 is yours. You can sit anywhere you like — it is your session — but the ladder says where your results put you.
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 cash tables, for each limit separately. Where the two cannot be told apart, the habit is priced but never pinned on you by name.
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 — a buy-in, cashing out, the money behind, a free card, a capped pot — 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 cash game. A short course covers the money behind a bet, why a hundred big blinds and one pair do not belong together, what happens in re-raised pots when everybody is deep, and — at a fixed-limit table — the price of a draw, raising for value and free cards, and calling down. Each lesson has the arithmetic worked through.
What it is not
There is no real money gambling in Poker Tutor Cash and no way to put any in. The buy-in is chips that exist only to keep score, chips cannot be bought, and no chip has any value outside the app. “Cashing out” ends a practice session and reports a number; nothing is paid to anyone. 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 tournaments: rising blinds, nine players, three paid. Poker Tutor Cash is a separate app for cash games, with its own habits, its own ladder of stakes and its own history. The two do not share anything, so what one has learned about your game does not carry to the other — and the habits are different. A tournament rewards knowing when the stack has to go in; a cash game punishes putting it in at all with the wrong hand.
Which limit should I pick?
The one you actually play. No-limit is the game most people mean by poker; pot-limit caps every bet at the size of the pot; fixed-limit makes every bet the same size and turns the game into one about prices and value. The coach, the habits it watches for and the lessons it offers change with your choice, and the choice is remembered between sessions.
Can I lose more than I bought in for?
No money is involved, so nothing is lost. If your chips run out, the app buys you back in for another hundred big blinds and counts it, so the session’s result includes every buy-in.
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 lowest stakes 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 for money; “cash out” in the app means ending the session and seeing a score.
What does it cost?
Your first 300 hands are free, and so is the assessment that produces your first scorecard. After that Poker Tutor Cash 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.