Playing Drills

Let’s dive into playing Custom Drills in the Lucid Poker Trainer. Be sure to check out Setting Up Custom Drills if you need help with that step.

Suppose you set up a Custom Drill where you play as the Big Blind against the Button in a single-raised pot. The screen that appears when you start the drill looks like this:

Here’s how to use the various features that appear on the screen here:

  • Replayer - The curved arrow icon at the top left corner of the screen opens the hand Replayer. The Replayer allows you to review all of the drills and decisions from your current session. If you play a hand and want to dive deeper into the overall strategy, click the Relayer button
  • Session statistics - The top right corner of the screen displays your session statistics, including total number of hands played, the average EV difference between your decisions and the Lucid-approved optimal decisions, and your session score (only applicable if you’re playing in Leaderboard mode).
  • Action buttons - The betting action buttons are situated right under the RNG toward the bottom-right of the screen. These buttons allow you to choose Fold, Call, or Raise, as well as choose between various sizing options depending on the situation.
  • Your last action - The bottom of the screen summarizes what the correct play was on your last decision. The bottom right corner of the screen displays what is arguably the most important information for Custom Drills in general - the optimal frequencies of each play for your last decision.
  • RNG - The RNG (Random Number Generator) is found on the right half of the screen just above the betting action buttons. The RNG comes into play when you’re faced with a spot in which Lucid uses a mixed strategy. Let’s take a deeper look into the RNG in the next section.

How to Use the RNG

Lucid often uses mixed strategies, and in these spots there’s more than one right answer. That’s where the RNG comes into play in terms of determining the correct frequency at which each action should be used.

For example, the following screen shows a Big Blind vs. Button single-raised pot drill. We’re playing as the Big Blind and we call an open from the Button.

The flop comes J-8-3 rainbow, we check, and Button c-bets for 1.5. We now must choose from the following decisions:

  • Fold
  • Call
  • Raise 4.82
  • Raise 8.36

When we make our decision here, Lucid’s optimal frequencies for this spot appear:

Lucid uses a mixed strategy here, with all decisions except Fold happening at some frequency:

  • Fold (0%)
  • Call (49%)
  • Raise 4.82 (19%)
  • Raise 8.36 (32%)

The RNG, in its default settings, assigns high numbers to aggressive actions, and low numbers to passive actions. In this case, you should Call if the RNG shows 0-49, Raise 4.82 if it shows 50-68, and Raise 8.36 if it shows 69-100.

In this drill, with the RNG showing 73, you should choose Raise 8.36. Call and Raise 4.82 aren’t wrong answers, but you’ll get the highest RNG accuracy score (and the highest Leaderboard score if you’re in Leaderboard mode) if you choose the answer that corresponds with what the RNG is showing.

To learn more about how the RNG and mixed-frequency decisions apply to poker strategy, check out this article.