A trainer for the game in front of you
A trainer for live low-stakes poker, where you get a messy pot, an uncounted stack and no time to work either of them out.
Most poker study material is built for online play, where you get a solver, a hand history and as long as you like. At a live table you get none of those. You get a pot nobody has counted, a straddle, a player you have been reading all night, and a table waiting on you.
PokerThangs is a site and a four-tab trainer. The trainer walks a real hand through eleven framework cards, one concept at a time, against the exact spot on the felt. Then eleven drills put the same skills on a timer.
Open PokerThangs.comThe trainer.
Four tabs: the hand walkthrough, the drills, your progress and a reference. All of it opens without an account.
What it does.
The hand walkthrough
- Real spots, one at a time, with the action history tagged: who raised, who is the aggressor, what the sizing was
- Eleven framework cards per hand, from ranges and pot odds through to bet sizing and tempo
- Three views of the same spot: Stacks, Odds and Reads
- Nine-seat table scenes that set the spot up before you are asked to price it
The drills
- Chip counting, on a stack drawn at real denominations rather than photographed
- Messy pot odds, live reads and baselines, and table and target selection
- Six math drills: combos and blockers, equity at a glance, break-even, implied odds, EV arithmetic and pressure math
- Range reading on the 13 by 13 grid: width, combos, notation and spot the flaw
- Accuracy and answer speed for each drill, kept on your own device
The site around it.
Written guides for the parts that are reading rather than drilling, and the whole thing on a phone.
The questions are generated, not written.
A drill holding thirty written questions is a drill you finish. After that you are recalling answers rather than doing the arithmetic, and the number on the screen stops meaning anything.
Every question here is produced by code at the moment you ask for it: the stack sizes, the board, the pot, the bet facing you. The answer key comes out of the same numbers that drew the picture, so the picture and the answer cannot drift apart, and the range grid derives its notation and its colored cells from one set of cells for the same reason.
It also closes the hole a written question bank leaves open, which is that a player can start beating a drill on the shape of the choices instead of the maths. When the numbers are new every time, the only way through is to do the work.
Tell us what your business does by hand.
A trainer, a referral app and a prep tool have nothing in common except the shape of the problem: somebody was doing it from memory and a notebook.
Based in St. Clair Shores, working across Metro Detroit.
The rest of the work
- GVST Wellness A yoga and group fitness studio running two St. Clair Shores locations, rebuilt off a template.
- LionHeart Fitness A strength and burnout coach in Fraser, selling a coaching relationship rather than a gym membership.
- Kozdron Homes A ground-up home builder working across Livingston County, and a homepage that lays a drawing sheet over a house they finished.
- WeeklyAsk A directory, this week's asks, the referral log, attendance and dues, in one place instead of five.
- SessionSmithy Prep for a tabletop game, in the shape you actually need it at the table.