Best Poker Coaching Sites & How to Find a Poker Coach

Poker is a game that is always evolving, becoming more and more tougher and difficult to beat with the average player becoming better. Why is that? Well, every single poker player out there has a litany of tools to use to improve. Poker is one of the games where being proactive about your learning pays the biggest dividends. 

Being proactive about your poker development could mean using a player to decide to try and find a poker coach. As these options are used more and more, it could be more important than ever for a poker player to get a poker coach in order to keep their game at the best possible level.

For a lot of players, just using standard poker learning resources isn’t quite enough to get to their full potential. Using a poker coach can be a crucial thing to unlocking your poker potential, getting past learning blocks, and winning the most money you can in poker. 

What Is a Poker Coach?

Just like in any sport or game, some people are better than others. Sometimes these people ascend to the pinnacles or upper echelons of a game and feel they have achieved enough. The next natural step for them is to pass this knowledge and experience on and coach poker. 

The poker coach software available online today can be equally as good as actually having a real poker coach, as the feedback can be detailed and instant. Before you decide that you are going to look for the best poker coach for your level or ability, you need to fully understand the role of a poker coach.

A true poker coach is someone who will analyze your current poker play, taking a look at a database sample to look at where your strengths and weaknesses are. They will then coach poker in a way to revamp your fundamentals and plug your leaks, by reviewing poker hands and looking at your overall strategy to see what can be improved. 

In the same way, you might get a fitness coach for your fitness goals, a poker coach can help you accomplish your poker goals. They can work with you in the same way a fitness coach does, including weekly one-on-ones, training exercises related to poker (check-raising more in the big blind for example), and detailed feedback on your progress.

The Types of Poker Coaches

When you look for a poker coach, you should first evaluate the type of poker player you are and what your needs will be. For example, if you are someone who gravitates towards more live poker and prefers tournaments to cash games, getting an online cash poker coach would be incredibly inefficient. 

Before you try and find a poker coach, it is crucial to understand the differences between all the different types of poker coaches available. Here are the various types of poker coaches you can find:

Online Poker Coach

This could be the easiest poker coach to find for many reasons. One is that there are so many poker players who have ground their way up the poker ladder in all stakes in the online poker world, as the opportunity is easily affordable to poker players to grind online and make that climb.

Online poker coaches will be focused on making sure you have a solid Game Theory Optimal approach and also take exploitative lines against opponents that have leaks. Because you play such a huge amount of hands as an online poker player, an online poker coach will be focused on specific areas of the game to ensure you are not finding yourself in tough spots often. 

The things an online poker coach might work on could be your preflop ranges, how you defend the big blind, your c-betting strategy, your check-raising frequency, and more. An online poker coach is much more likely going to want to go through your database, whether that is Hold’em Manager or PokerTracker, and check your stats to see where you are making mistakes. 

A huge benefit of an online poker coach is that they do not have to be there every step of the way. Your coach can observe your play through live stream or recording and work with you remotely to get your poker coaching in. 

Live Poker Coach

A live poker coach has a completely different challenge than an online poker coach. Live poker players do not have as detailed stats or huge sample sizes as online poker players – the stats could be something as simple as overall winnings, and their biggest leaks will be what the player perceives them to be. 

A live poker coach will not sit with you during your live poker session and take notes – that just is not realistic. What you will see from a live poker coach is a more heuristic approach to your poker game. They will look at how you play poker from the ground up and make sure you are playing correctly and effectively. To maximize EV (expected value) a live poker coach will encourage you to take exploitative lines as opposed to GTO, and you will be coached in the ways to make the most money possible. 

This can include things like finding the best possible cash games, being a positive live player so you get more invites and opportunities, being physically and mentally prepared for the long hours of live poker, having a correct preflop and post-flop strategy with correct sizings, making sure you do not give poker tells and more. 

When it comes to living poker coaching, you will need to take the initiative before you find a live poker coach and see where your leak is. If you are not winning at all, you can start from ground zero. If you are winning but not maximizing your win rate, you will have to see where you are struggling and work with a live poker coach to rectify this.

Tournament Poker Coach

A tournament poker coach is usually a poker pro who was successful in multi-table tournaments and now has decided to use their approach and experience to help players become the best poker tournament players they can be. 

A poker tournament coach will primarily focus on tournament aspects like having the correct preflop ranges for different stack sizes, understanding the strategies around defending your big blind wider, and ICM (independent chip model) to win the most money in tournaments. 

A poker tournament coach will coach a player on all the fundamentals to successfully play each stage of a tournament and improve the player’s long-term win rate in poker tournaments. 

Cash Game Poker Coach

A cash game poker coach will be a poker player who has a long-term win rate in cash games and understands how to help different poker players refine their game to improve their win rate themselves. 

Whilst a tournament poker coach will have a tough time going through all the aspects of tournament poker, cash game poker is much easier to coach. A good poker coach for cash should be able to identify leaks in a player’s game and also implement simple foundational plays to help improve their poker game. 

A cash game poker coach will typically be more interested in reviewing databases and stats and will be focused more on the overall fundamentals of a poker player, ensuring they are comfortable playing deep stack and making sure they are not being too wide or tight preflop. 

How to Find a Poker Coach

To find a poker coach for yourself, you should work through a methodical process to make sure you get the best possible return on investment for your money. 

What you will often find is that poker players who are desperate to improve will rush and sign up with the first coach they find, ignoring the potential of the poker coach not being honest or the poker coaching arrangement not being a good fit. 

You can do so by going through the following questions and thinking about which poker coach would suit you best:

• Which type of coach do you need? – Setting a clear pathway of improvement for yourself in an area of poker will help you find the best poker coach. Do you want to become a great live cash game player? Then you should look for a poker coach that has a great resume in live cash games. 

• Which medium do I use to search? – Once you realize which type of poker coach you want, you should decide on the way you will source them. Using poker forums like r/poker or twoplustwo might be the best possible way, as it is the best pool of poker players, and will be easy to connect with them.

• How do you compare poker coaches? – When you have identified multiple poker coaches, you should begin comparing the poker coaches through your research and outreach. If they take a while to reply, that shows bad communication. If you can’t validate their results, that is another huge red flag. 

Once you have compared, analyzed, contacted, and prepared your first poker coach, you should begin working out a fee with them and compare the market to see if it both fits your budget and is a fair price for the quality of poker coaching you’ll be getting. 

What Will a Poker Coach Provide?

When you start your training with a poker coach, you will need to make sure that you give your input at the start. This will help the poker coach align you to the right coaching path and help them prepare poker coaching software that can help you down the line. 

Ahead of your poker coaching, you will want to make sure that you point the poker coach in the right direction when it comes to improving your game. Whether it is understanding how to play pre-flop or having a better c-betting strategy, you need to make sure the poker coach knows what to focus on.

Once you get into the poker coaching sessions, you should start to take more of a back seat and be receptive. The coach will give you the strategy and advice, and you must give yourself both the chance to digest it and also the ability to understand. You should always ask questions about things you do not understand, but you should also make sure you give the poker coach every chance to simplify a very complex game. 

In between coaching sessions, you should be applying the strategies and coaching you received from the poker coach whilst you play. You should monitor any differences you have noticed and also any struggles should you encounter them – they should be brought up to the poker coach at the next session.

At the end of a poker coaching tenure, you should get a database review or holistic run-through to make sure you have plugged any leaks or understood the taught poker curriculum to ensure you got value for money during your poker coaching. 

Signs of a Good and Bad Poker Coach

You must look for signs from your poker coach early on in the relationship. Just putting up with a bad poker coach is wasting your time and money, and you should notice bad signs to make sure you can change as soon as possible. 

A bad poker coach will: 

• Be unresponsive to communication and late to sessions.
• Be unable to break down the coaching material into a simpler form.
• Be rude or dismissive if you cannot understand their poker coaching.
• Not being invested in you becoming a better poker player by the end of the poker coaching period.

A good poker coach can be such a huge asset, so it is important to notice the signs of one and make sure you appreciate them early to keep the poker relationship healthy and lasting.

A good poker coach will: 

• Be on time and well prepared for sessions and timely in responses.
• Make the game and their strategies simple when it comes to their poker coaching.
• Be encouraging, respectful, and pleasant during the coaching sessions.
• Be driven and invested in you becoming a better poker player by the end of the poker coaching period. 

Whilst a bad poker coach can be a waste of time and money, a good poker coach can be a huge benefit and provide a huge ROI. Strong poker coaching can allow a player to unlock their poker ability and potential, helping them move up in stakes and make more money from poker.