Playing Drills

Once you’ve set up a drill and clicked the “Start Drill” button, you’ll see a screen appear that will look very familiar if you've played much online poker.

Depending on the specifications you’ve chosen, you’ll now see those parameters in play for your drill. As you play, each action you take is granded in terms of expected value (EV) loss (or lack thereof). The best score for any action is 0.00, meaning your move did not lose any EV compared to the optimal strategy.

For example, let’s say you set up a custom drill for BTN vs BB in a single-raised pot. You choose to play as the BTN in this drill.

When you start playing your drill, you’ll see a screen that looks like this:

If you choose to drill with random flops, both the flop and your hole cards will be random for each hand in the drill.

In the spot above, you have pocket tens on an A-K-6 flop. The BB has checked, and you’re faced with the decision to check or bet.

If you decide to bet, you’ll choose from among three bet sizes (a ⅓-pot size, a ⅔-pot size, and an overbet).

Let’s choose to bet 1.82 (the ⅓-pot size ) and see what happens:

You bet 1.82, and the BB fold Q3 suited. Let’s now take a look at the information that appears at the bottom of the screen.

At the bottom right corner, we see that pocket tens should be checked 100% of the time here. Our action (Bet 1.82) should be done 0% of the time.

The EV Difference between our move and the correct move is 0.08 BB in this scenario. That’s a relatively small error in terms of EV.

If you make a large EV error, Lucid displays that more prominently. Let’s take a look at an example.

In this spot, you have pocket sixes on the turn with the board showing T-4-2-9. You choose to overbet:

At the bottom right of the screen, we can see once again that this is a 100% check spot. This time the EV difference is 0.89, and that’s large enough to trigger the EV ERROR popup that shows up in the middle of the screen.

Keep in mind that drills can involve practicing a single decision, a single street, or an entire hand. The drill plays out based on the settings you choose (see the Setting Up Drills section).

Custom drills include a time bank and a random number generator, which mimic what you’d see in an online poker room.

When playing a custom drill, the shot clock and RNG don’t have any influence on your score (i.e. you’ll only see the EV of a given decision).

When you play the Leaderboard drills on Lucid, the time bank and RNG do impact your score.