Learn Poker For Free: Top Tools To Improve Your Game

There are no shortage of site offering to make you a better online poker player – for a price. What you may not know is that there are also an awesome amount of resources online that can dramatically improve your game without any cost to you besides your time.

Let’s talk briefly about a handful of ways you can brush up your poker skills without paying anything out of pocket.

Poker software tools Equity Calculators

Equity and hand ranges can be one of the toughest concepts for otherwise solid players to grasp. Luckily, there are a number of free equity calculators – most notably PokerStove – that make understanding your expected value against a range of likely hands a relatively simple exercise. You can also pay money for more advanced calculators, but learning the basics will require no more than one of the many free equity calculators available online.

Poker Forums

Discussing real money online poker hands with other players can be very intimidating, but you don’t even have to participate directly in forums to garner a benefit; simply lurking and reviewing the posts of others will certainly prove useful in and of itself. That said, participating is going to be a great way to network and get a wide variety of insights into your play, so try to get over your shyness sooner than later.

Hand Replayers

Most major online poker rooms offer some sort of built-in hand replayer, but if you call a smaller site home you might not have access to such a tool. Thankfully, there are literally dozens of hand replayers that allow you to take a raw hand history text file and convert it to a visual representation of the hand. This makes session review a much easier process, and also helps you to place the hand in the proper context by triggering your visual memory in a way that raw text simply can’t.

Advanced Software Trials

Free trials are shunned by some people. Don’t be one of those people. You can try out full versions of some very powerful poker software for several weeks without paying a dime. Even limited function versions are still going to be useful to you on some level, especially if you’re a newer player. Almost every piece of poker software offers a trial, and you’d be surprised how much use you can get out of poker software like holdem manager in just a few hours – let alone a few days.

That’s a great starting point for those who are looking to burnish their poker prowess without breaking their bankrolls. If you’ve got more resources to share, contact us or add them in the comments.