Poker Training Apps, Revisited: What Changed in 2026

Back in March we published a comparison of poker training apps. Six months is a long time in this corner of the world. The market leader rebuilt its pricing. AI explanations, which almost nobody offered back then, started showing up in other apps. And we shipped enough ourselves that our own section of that post is badly out of date.

So here’s the update. We make one of these tools, so weigh our opinions accordingly. But several of the others are the better choice for some players, and we’ll say which ones.

Every price and feature below was checked against each company’s own site or app store listing in September 2026. Prices change, so follow the links before you buy.

What Changed Since March

Three things.

GTO Wizard got more expensive and much bigger. At the end of March it merged its separate game formats into two products, cash and tournament, and raised prices on most plans. It has since added Pot-Limit Omaha, a game like Hold’em in which each player gets four cards.

AI explanations stopped being rare. In March, a tool that explained why a play is right, in words, was close to unique. Now DTO Poker has a “Virtual Coach,” the makers of Postflop+ have a separate AI chat app, and a training app we didn’t cover in March, GTO Gecko, breaks each solution down in plain language. We think this is great. It’s the direction we argued the whole field would go.

We shipped. Poker Sense now has native iPhone and Android apps, 30 languages, regional pricing, and a lot more to practice. Details below.

That work is why this comparison asks two questions the March one didn’t: does the tool speak your language, and is the price fair where you live?

GTO Wizard

GTO Wizard is still the market leader, and still deserves to be. It has the largest library of solved poker situations anywhere: cash games, tournaments, heads-up (one-on-one) play, and now Omaha. Its practice mode lets you drill any spot from the first bet to the last card.

What’s new: Beyond the format merge, the most interesting addition for everyday players is Profiles. Instead of always practicing against a perfect opponent, you can practice against a modeled type of player – GTO Wizard’s own example is training against a “fish,” a weak player who plays too many hands. That’s a real step toward how home games actually play. Node locking – fixing an opponent’s strategy by hand and re-solving to see how you should adjust – is on the Elite tier.

Price: Starter is $49 a month, or $39 a month billed annually. Premium and Elite sit above that, and the top Ultra tier is $279 a month. There’s a limited free tier.

Platform and languages: It runs in the browser. There’s no native phone app – GTO Wizard’s help center says so directly and suggests installing the website to your home screen instead. The interface comes in 18 languages, which is the widest coverage of any tool here other than ours.

The gap for recreational players: The same one as in March. GTO Wizard shows you frequencies, expected values, and range charts, and trusts you to read them. We couldn’t find a feature that explains a decision in plain words; its public roadmap lists turning solver output into human language as future work. If you already read solver output fluently, you won’t miss it. If you don’t, it’s a lot of data and not much teaching.

The Phone Apps: Postflop+, Preflop+, and DTO Poker

These are the tools closest to us in price, and they were built for phones from day one.

Postflop+ and Preflop+ are separate apps from Crafty Wheel Studios: one for the first betting round (preflop), one for everything after. Postflop+ is $14.99 a month, $99.99 a year, or $199.99 once for lifetime access; Preflop+ is $9.99 a month. Both have free daily drills, both work offline, and Postflop+ covers cash games, tournaments, and the fast three-player format called Spins in one subscription. They’re fast, polished drilling tools.

What they don’t do is explain. The app tells you instantly whether your play matches the solver’s, and that’s it. The same studio now sells a separate AI chat app, Poker Coach+, but it lives outside the training apps. Postflop+ and Preflop+ are iPhone and Android only, their purchases don’t carry between the two platforms, and the App Store lists both as English only.

DTO Poker splits into a cash game app and a tournament app. On the web, the cash game plans are $9.99 a month (Beginner) and $39.99 a month (Pro); the free tier includes every preflop solution plus unlimited practice in one spot after the flop. DTO is the closest thing to us in one respect: paid plans include a Virtual Coach, powered by OpenAI, that promises clear, easy-to-understand explanations of every move.

Two things to know. The Beginner plan is a fixed list of 21 training spots, and the Pro plan that opens the rest costs four times as much. And the apps are listed as English only, with no App Store update since late 2025.

Lucid Poker

Lucid Poker, from the training site Upswing Poker, is the most generous free offer in this post: unlimited preflop lookups, five postflop solves a day, and a daily quiz called Cardle that walks you through the solver’s logic on one hand. It has apps for Windows, Mac, Linux, iPhone, and Android, and covers cash games, tournaments, heads-up, and Spins.

The paid plan is a single tier: $49 a month or $490 a year, with a 14-day free trial. That’s GTO Wizard money, and Lucid is aimed at a similar player – someone who wants to look up and drill exact solutions. Written explanations are available only for that one daily quiz hand.

GTO Gecko

GTO Gecko wasn’t in our March comparison, and it’s the tool here thinking most like we do. Its pitch is that every solution gets broken down in plain language – blockers (cards in your hand that make your opponent’s strong hands less likely), equity (your share of the pot if the remaining cards were dealt out), and range advantage (which player’s overall set of possible hands is stronger on this board). It does this with a machine-learning engine that works out which factors mattered, rather than a coach you can talk to: you get a breakdown, not a conversation.

It runs on the web, iPhone, Android, and Mac. One format – cash, tournaments, or Spins – is $24.99 a month or $149.99 a year; all three are $39.99 a month or $239.99 a year. There’s a free tier with daily practice hands, and the website comes in 11 languages.

The Desktop Solvers: PioSOLVER and GTO+

These two are still for the same players as before. PioSOLVER (€450 for Pro, €800 for Edge, one-time) and GTO+ ($75, one-time) are Windows programs that compute custom solutions from inputs you set up yourself. PioSOLVER shipped a much faster engine in July. Both can test you by comparing your decisions with a solution you’ve computed, and neither explains anything. If you’re wondering whether you need to run a solver, you don’t.

Poker Sense

Poker Sense is a GTO training app with an AI coach. (GTO means Game Theory Optimal: the balanced strategy a solver computes, which no opponent can consistently beat.) You play hands, the app grades every decision from Great to Blunder, and you can tap “Ask Why” to have an actual back-and-forth conversation about the hand you just played. The coach works from the solver’s data for that exact spot – your cards, the board, the positions – and you can push back, ask “what if the turn were a heart?”, and keep going until it clicks.

What’s new since March:

Native apps for iPhone and Android. In March we were a website that worked on your phone. Now there are real apps in both stores, and one subscription covers web, iPhone, and Android.
30 languages. The app, the coach, the emails, and this blog. More on that below.
More to practice. All four betting rounds, 3-bet and 4-bet pots (pots that were re-raised before the flop), limped pots, and the spot every home game player actually faces: what to do when two people have already limped in front of you.
Exploit & Recover mode (Pro) drills the spots where a range is narrow, your opponent’s or your own, plus the pots where you’re facing limpers.
A Stats page with leak detection (Pro). A leak is a habit that quietly costs you chips, and the page finds the position, street, or pot type costing you the most, with a “Practice this” button that sets up a practice session targeting that leak.
A 7-day free trial of the Basic plan for new subscribers, or 30 days if a friend referred you.

Price: Free (20 hands and 3 coaching conversations a day, covering preflop play and single-raised pots on the flop). Basic is $9.99 a month or $99.99 a year. Pro, with unlimited hands and coaching, is $14.99 a month or $149.99 a year, or $449.99 once for lifetime access (sold on the web).

Where it falls short:

It’s one game format. Poker Sense covers six-handed No-Limit Hold’em cash games at 100 big blinds deep, and nothing else. We think that’s the right standard for a home game, but there are no tournament solutions, no Omaha, and no other stack depths. If you mostly play tournaments, every other training app in this post serves you better than we do.

The library is smaller. GTO Wizard and Lucid let you look up nearly any spot; we don’t have a solution browser at all yet. You learn by playing hands, not by studying charts.

There’s no node locking or advanced range analysis. If you want to change an opponent’s strategy by hand and see how the solution changes, GTO Wizard and PioSOLVER do that and we don’t.

Does It Speak Your Language?

This wasn’t a question we could ask in March. Since then, language support has become one of the biggest things we’ve built, for a simple reason: poker theory is hard enough in your first language.

Poker Sense is now fully translated into 30 languages, including Spanish, Portuguese, German, French, Japanese, Korean, Hindi, Turkish, Vietnamese, Arabic, and Hebrew. That covers the app, the emails, this blog, and the part that matters most: the coach. Ask why in Polish and the answer comes back in Polish, using the poker words Polish players actually say at the table rather than dictionary translations.

GTO Wizard is the only other tool here with serious coverage, at 18 interface languages. GTO+ has added a handful, including French, Japanese, and Korean, and GTO Gecko’s website comes in 11 languages. The phone apps – Postflop+, Preflop+, and both DTO apps – are listed as English only.

And there’s a difference between a translated menu and a translated explanation. A range chart reads about the same in any language. A paragraph on why you should check this flop does not.

Is the Price Fair Where You Live?

$10 a month is a small number in Seattle and a large one in São Paulo. Most subscription apps handle this by converting the US price into local currency and calling it done. Lucid’s $49 plan, for example, is listed at ₹4,999 in India’s App Store – the same price, in rupees.

We adjust for purchasing power instead. Poker Sense sorts countries into five groups by average income relative to the US, with discounts from 15% up to 65%. A player in Poland pays 15% less, a player in Brazil 30% less, and a player in India half. It applies on the web and in both app stores, and you don’t have to ask for it or find a coupon. The pricing page shows US prices; sign in and you’ll see yours.

We couldn’t find another tool in this comparison that says it does this.

Quick Comparison

	GTO Wizard	Postflop+	DTO Poker (cash)	Lucid Poker	GTO Gecko	Poker Sense
Monthly price	$49-279	$14.99	$9.99-39.99	$49	$24.99-39.99	$9.99-14.99
Free tier	Limited	Daily drills	Preflop + 1 spot	Generous	Daily hands	20 hands a day
Platform	Web	iPhone, Android	Web, iPhone, Android	Desktop, iPhone, Android	Web, iPhone, Android, Mac	Web, iPhone, Android
Explains “why”	No (shows data)	No	Yes (AI explanations)	One daily quiz hand	Yes (factor breakdown)	Yes (AI conversation)
Languages	18	English	English	Not listed	11 (website)	30
Regional price	Not advertised	Not advertised	Not advertised	Not advertised	Not advertised	Yes, up to 65% off
Game formats	Cash, tournaments, Omaha	Cash, tournaments, Spins	Cash or tournaments	Cash, tournaments, Spins	Cash, tournaments, Spins	6-max cash only
Best for	Serious and pro players	Players who want fast practice on a phone	Players who want practice with short explanations	Players who look up exact solutions	Multi-format players who want breakdowns	Recreational players who want to understand why

Our Recommendation

If poker is a real source of income for you: GTO Wizard. That was the answer in March and the price increase doesn’t change it. Nothing else has the library, and Profiles made it better for preparing against real opponents.

If you play tournaments: Not us. GTO Wizard if you’re serious, DTO’s tournament app or GTO Gecko if you want something lighter and cheaper.

If you want quick drills on your phone and you already know the theory: Postflop+ is excellent at exactly that, and its lifetime price is hard to argue with.

If you want a free solution lookup: Lucid Poker’s free tier.

If you play a home game and want to actually understand what you’re doing: We build Poker Sense for you, and we think the case for it got stronger since March. You can talk to the coach instead of reading a breakdown, in your own language, on your phone, for a price that fits where you live. The free tier is enough to find out whether it works for you: twenty hands and three conversations a day, no credit card.

And the closing advice from March still stands, because it’s still the thing that matters most: the best tool is the one you’ll actually use. Fifteen minutes a day with a $10-a-month app beats a $49-a-month subscription you open twice. If you need help with that part, here’s how to build a training routine that sticks.

The Bottom Line

Six months ago, a poker tool that explained itself in words was unusual. Now several do, in different ways, and that’s good for everyone who learns by understanding instead of memorizing.

The differences that remain are about who each tool is for. GTO Wizard is for the professional. Postflop+ and DTO are for drilling. Lucid is for looking things up. We’re for you if you play at a kitchen table and want a patient answer to “why?” – in your own language, at a price that makes sense where you live.

Pick the one that matches how you play. Then show up.