What Is Poker IQ? An Elo Rating for Poker Skills

Most training apps give you an XP bar, and XP bars measure one thing: how much time you spent in the app.

We wanted a number that measures whether you are actually getting better at poker. So we borrowed the rating system with decades of credibility behind it: Elo.

Every drill is a match

In chess, your rating rises when you beat players rated near or above you, and barely moves when you beat someone far below you. Poker IQ treats every drill question the same way. Each question carries a difficulty from 1 to 5, mapped to a rating from 800 to 1600. Answer correctly and you win the match, gaining points scaled by how hard the question was rated. Miss, and you lose points the same way.

The consequences are exactly what you want from an honest score. Farming easy questions does nothing, because beating an 800-rated question when you are rated 1300 pays almost zero. The only way up is answering harder questions correctly.

The 10 skills

One number cannot tell you what to work on, so Poker IQ is a confidence-weighted rollup of 10 separately rated skills in 3 groups:

Difficulty adapts per skill, not one level for your whole game. Someone strong at pot odds but weak at board reading gets hard math questions and easier board questions, each rated on its own ladder. Your weaknesses are trained at the level where they actually are, not at the level of your best skill.

Honest decay

Real skills get rusty, and most apps handle this dishonestly in one of two directions: either nothing ever fades, or your score bleeds away to pressure you into opening the app.

Poker IQ splits the two ideas. Each skill's strength bar decays with a 21-day half-life: stop practicing pot odds for three weeks and the bar shows half strength, which honestly says "time to review." The underlying rating never decays. Skill you earned is never taken from you; the display just stops pretending it is fresh.

Realization: train versus play

Knowing the right answer in a quiz and finding it at the table with real money in the pot are different skills. PokerInk scores them separately across the same 10 skills. Poker IQ (Train) is what your drills say you know. Realization compares that against how you actually play in your logged hands, so the app can tell you something a quiz app never can: your theory is ahead of your execution, and here is the specific place it shows.

What feeds the drills

Questions come from a reviewed bank of thousands of hands, every one gated by a deterministic poker evaluator that verifies its factual claims, and every answer comes with an explanation of why. How that bank is built is its own engineering story. Your daily set is chosen from the skills your rating says are weakest, which closes the loop this whole app exists for: your hands expose a leak, the leak rules name it, and the trainer drills it.

No XP. No streaks-for-their-own-sake. Difficulty and mastery move the number, and the number tells the truth.

Find out where your game is weakest

PokerInk is free to start on iPhone, Android, and the web. See pricing.