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Read MoreLearning how to become a better online poker player is now something that millions of players attempt each year. As a consequence, there are a plethora of poker training sites to appeal to players of all levels. From beginners to seasoned professionals, the hopeful newbie to the GTO-primed elite, training to be a better online poker player is something that a huge percentage of the poker-playing public do.
We’ve found seven great poker trainings sites to bring your game to the next level, wherever you’re starting from.
Octopi Poker
Established in 2024, Octopi Poker is the brainchild of poker players Nick Schulman, Phil Shing, Victoria Livschitz and Andrew ‘Chewy’ Lichtenberger among others blends the highest technical capabilities and GTO strategies with a friendly community and an affordable pricing structure.
Bringing AI (Artificial Intelligence) to GTO helps players in double-quick time on the app and while the Professional package is $450 per year and the Personal package $180, you can join the Octopi Community part of the site for free and enjoy pre-flop range assistance, add hands into your personal database and interact with other players about your game, following your friends and other poker players.
Unmissable value to join for free, we’d recommend the Personal package for anyone of any level looking to improve at their game, while the Professional option is a superb choice for anyone looking to turn their already solid game into something more spectacular.
Upswing Poker
If you’re a player of any level looking for a leg up in poker, then Upswing Poker is a great choice. With a range of free tutorials, hand charts and advanced training courses to suit the more seasoned poker player, Upswing has long been the destination of thousands of American poker players.
Upswing Poker is free to join and for absolutely nothing you can access their Pre-Flop Charts, Level Up Podcast, their 10 Laws of Live Poker and Hand Converter. Advanced Poker Training by Uri Peleg costs $499 and services beginners in improving their poker game. The Upswing Lab Training Course costs $99 per month and features lessons from Doug Polk, Gary Blackwood and others, while the PLO Launch Pad is $99 and promises to ‘quickly make you a winner at Pot Limit Omaha’. Their tips to help you run deep in tournaments are great, too!
Poker Trainer
A novel approach to training exists at Poker Trainer, which features a poker simulator that puts you in different poker scenarios, allowing you to practice until you’re perfect. With regular feedback, scores and levels to climb the ranks, you can track your improvements as you make them.
There are also some private coaching opportunities hosted by the site, with the cash game coach Aleksandar Stojkovic offering a €50 per hour class that promises to improve you and exploit GTO play. In fact, Stojkovic thinks you should counteract GTO play and his sessions include analysis of opponents, finding – and fixing – leaks in your game, as well as teaching you how to get the most out of a HUD, or heads-up display, something that other sites charge a lot more for.
There’s also a performance coach, Karim Chelli, who has nine years of coaching experience and you can study under his tutelage for $100 an hour or by purchasing his full program. Chelli is a fascinating character, having started out as a dating and relationship coach at the age of just 21. His insights into the mental game of poker are huge and varied and he coaches the mindsets of elite players from around the world.
Poker Coaching
Jonathan Little’s PokerCoaching.com offers the very best in poker coaching, with live webinars for free, vital assistance in managing your bankroll and how to get and keep an edge on your opponents. Favored by thousands upon thousands of people around the globe – 120,000 at last count – there are over 5,700 community members, with the ‘quiz’ element of Poker Coaching seeing players take over 6.5 million quizzes to improve their games.
With the coaches in play having a collective resume of over $57 million in live and online earnings, PokerCoaching advocates active learning. Where some players can learn passively, watching videos and listening to how they should have played in a particular situation, active learning occurs when you play the spot yourself and get feedback from an elite coach.
Everything is about elite self-improvement at Poker Coaching and with 20 interactive hand quizzes, 10 coaching classes and GTO Pre-Flop Charts for Cash Games and Tournaments available for free, you can start learning for nothing. The Standard package, however, costs just $39 per month and has been credited by WSOP bracelet winners for transforming their games. With 1,800 interactive quizzes, including new ones every week, you can also ‘Master the Fundamentals’ in a far more comprehensive way, and your Pre-Flop charts cover everything from ICM to heads-up battles as well as tournaments and cash games.
Finally, the Premium package features all of the above and much more with new coaching classes every week, as well as 700+ coaching classes and 70 poker courses all being available. Live weekly coaching, cash game and tournament challenges and masterclasses in every area of the game make this a package for any winning player looking to maximize their edge.
Run It Once
Phil Galfond is the elite pro behind Run It Once, which has been helping players a lot in recent years. The coaches on board are some of the best in the business and with a basic taste of RIO available for free, you can access unlimited forums. Become an ‘Essential’ or low stakes member for $24.99 per month and you’ll receive five new essential videos per week, as well as having access to all 3,273 on the site.
The Elite or High Stakes package costs $199 a month or $1,400 per year, a saving of almost $1,000, where you’ll also have full access to elite video and an interactive Q & A with elite coaches every single week. Phil Galfond’s track record is excellent, and his reputation is absolutely top notch. Not only is the value there across all packages but his expertise is priceless.
Chasing Poker Greatness
With one of the most varied and expanded databases of courses out there, Chasing Poker Greatness is extremely popular and breaks poker down into easy to digest courses that help you master a particular aspect of poker you might be struggling with. Take the Preflop Bootcamp 2.0 for example. At $297, it’s not cheap but it has a full 12-step guide to pre-flop play and over 60 optimal pre-flop ranges, with a course discussion coming after the lessons you take too. There’s also a Pre-Bootcamp evaluation and after the course, you really feel like you have a definable edge against your opponents in this department.
All the coaches at Chasing Poker Greatness (CPG) “live, breath, eat, and sleep poker strategy” and CPG declare their core value as providing you with the best tools to improve your game. They don’t want your money, they want you to improve and its this ethic of care that has truly connected the with poker players in a way some other sites haven’t.
With the best CPG courses quick to pick up, very easy to study and noticeably effective in raising your edge at the felt, we can’t recommend them highly enough.
With a range of courses suited to poker players of all levels who aren’t just looking to get marginally better but crush their opponents, CPG really pushes the envelope in the poker training space.
Masterclass with Daniel Negreanu
There are few better teachers or players in poker than Daniel ‘Kid Poker’ Negreanu. Fortunately for poker nuts, the seven-time WSOP bracelet winner – he’s won one more than when he first published this course in 2018 – is both. Learning MasterClass with Daniel Negreanu is a high value, low cost course that is designed to inform, entertain and educate in equal measure and it really pays you off.
While ‘DNegs’ covers everything from theory, pre-flop ranges, betting tactics and those all-important physical tells, as he says himself, ‘everything you do at the felt conveys information’ and he blows the lid on some tactics shared by many common opponents you’ll face.
At just $5 per month for a limited time, you can access not only Daniel’s course but that of Phil Ivey too. Even at $10 a month, its daylight robbery, because between Ivey and Negreanu, you learn so, so much and from two of the most charismatic players ever to share the felt.
In Conclusion
If you’re looking to invest in your poker game, then you have an array of different ways to do so. From elite brands such as Run It Once, Octopi Poker and Upswing Poker to specific masterclasses by poker greats Daniel Negreanu and Phil Ivey, there’s something for everyone. Popular catch-all sites such as Poker Coaching, Chasing Poker Greatness and Poker Trainer offer you several methods of making the most of your poker game at a fraction of the cost.