Learn
Strategy guides and engineering notes from the team behind PokerInk. Plain language, no hype, and no number we cannot back up. The free reference tools live under Poker Basics, Range Charts, and the Odds Calculator.
Poker Tells That Actually Hold Up Live
Tells are real and overrated at once. Baseline first, the timing and attention patterns that carry signal, and how to stop giving off your own.
Aug 23, 2026 · 6 min read
Strategy
Why Your Poker App's Win Rate Is Probably Wrong
A win rate computed from the hands you chose to log is computed on a biased sample. What live players should track instead: honest money stats per session.
Aug 17, 2026 · 6 min read
16 Common Poker Leaks: What Winning Players Do Differently
A leak is a mistake you repeat without noticing. The 16 leak rules PokerInk checks automatically, with the benchmark ranges winning players sit inside.
Aug 17, 2026 · 9 min read
Poker Chip Values and Colors: Casino Standards and Home Game Setups
Standard poker chip colors and values used in US casinos, plus practical chip assignments and starting stacks for home cash games and tournaments.
Aug 21, 2026 · 6 min read
Home Poker Tournament Blind Structure: Schedules That Actually Work
Copy-paste blind structures for home poker tournaments: 2-hour turbo and 4-hour standard schedules, the math behind them, and fair payouts and rebuys.
Aug 21, 2026 · 7 min read
First Time Playing Poker at a Casino: What Actually Happens
Walking into a card room for the first time: getting on the list, buying chips, the procedural rules nobody explains, and the etiquette that matters.
Aug 21, 2026 · 8 min read
How to Calculate Pot Odds (and Actually Use Them at the Table)
The one-division formula, the rule of 4 and 2, and a worked hand carried from flop to turn with exact numbers you can verify in one click.
Aug 23, 2026 · 7 min read
How to Host a Poker Night People Want to Come Back To
Six decisions made before anyone arrives: format, stakes, chips, blinds, house rules, and food. Defaults included, disputes prevented.
Aug 23, 2026 · 7 min read
Poker Bankroll Management for Live Players
The 20-40 buy-in convention and the three inputs that produce it: your edge, your format's swings, and what losing the roll would cost you.
Aug 23, 2026 · 6 min read
Product
Why We Built PokerInk: A Poker Journal With a Coach Inside
You cannot fix a leak you never recorded. Why live poker needed a journal built for the table, and how logging, AI review, and drills close the loop.
Aug 17, 2026 · 6 min read
What Is Poker IQ? An Elo Rating for Poker Skills
Poker IQ rates 10 poker skills the way chess rates players: every drill is an Elo match between you and the question. No XP, no grinding, honest decay.
Aug 17, 2026 · 7 min read
Compare
Best Poker Journal & Tracker Apps in 2026: An Honest Comparison
Pokerbase, Poker Analytics 6, Poker Bankroll Tracker, and PokerInk compared honestly: what each app is actually built for, and which one fits your game.
Aug 17, 2026 · 8 min read
PokerInk vs Pokerbase: Journal and Coach, or Tracker and Staking
Pokerbase centers on bankroll tracking and staking. PokerInk centers on hand journaling, AI coaching, and training. An honest side-by-side for 2026.
Aug 17, 2026 · 6 min read
PokerInk vs Poker Analytics 6: Coaching Loop or Stats Depth
Poker Analytics 6 is a veteran iOS session tracker with deep stats. PokerInk adds AI coaching and training on your logged hands. An honest side-by-side.
Aug 17, 2026 · 6 min read
PokerInk vs Poker Bankroll Tracker: Coach or Community Tracker
Poker Bankroll Tracker is a widely used all-in-one results tracker. PokerInk is a hand journal with an AI coach inside. An honest side-by-side for 2026.
Aug 17, 2026 · 6 min read
Engineering
How We Stopped Our AI Poker Coach From Hallucinating Hands
An AI poker coach cannot be allowed to misread a gutshot as a flush draw. The fix was not a better prompt: the model never gets to assert a poker fact at all.
Aug 17, 2026 · 7 min read
AI Generates, AI Verifies, Code Decides: Building a Poker Drill Bank You Can Trust
An LLM can write a plausible poker question in two seconds. Plausible is the problem. The pipeline that grows a reviewed drill bank of thousands of hands.
Aug 17, 2026 · 8 min read
Designing an App for a Dark Card Room
One thumb, low light, two seconds between actions, no reliable signal. Every design decision in PokerInk follows from where the app is actually used.
Aug 17, 2026 · 6 min read
AI Assistants Guess at Poker Math. We Gave Them Our Engine Instead.
Language models answer poker equity questions from intuition, and intuition is wrong postflop. So we exposed our exact enumeration engine as a public MCP server.
Aug 21, 2026 · 6 min read
Exact Poker Math for AI Assistants: Engineering Notes
How our exact enumeration engine counts 1.7 million runouts in 250ms in a browser, why the same code runs 15x slower in our own app, and how AI assistants call it.
Aug 23, 2026 · 8 min read