Setting Up Drills

The Custom Drills in Lucid Poker allow you to set up a specific spot, and practice that scenario over and over.

Let’s talk about setting up a Custom Drill.

I’m going to build a tournament drill here, but the process is the same for cash games, heads-up, and the other game types.

Here’s a look at the setting I’m going to use for this example drill:

Let’s go through what each of these settings entails (be sure to watch the video above for a full explanation of what each setting does).

  • Stack (bb) - This setting determines the size of the effective stack in the drill. I’m choosing 50bb (50 big blinds ) here.
  • Street - Set up either a preflop or a postflop drill. I’m choosing Postflop here.
  • Action - You can set up a drill for a limped pot, isolation over a limp (ISO), a single-raised pot (SRP), a 3-bet pot (3BP) or a 4-bet pot (4BP). You can also choose the Custom option to set up a spot that might not be covered among the preset options. I’m choosing a single-raised pot (SRP) drill here.
  • Hero position - You can choose your table position in the drill in this menu. I’m choosing to play as the Button (BTN) here.
  • Villain position - Select your opponent’s table position in this menu. I’m choosing the Lojack for my opponent’s position here.
  • Ends after - This menu lets you select whether the drill ends after the first decision, ends after one street, or plays through the entire hand. I’m choosing one street here.

When you have your settings locked in, click the green Start drill button to begin the drill.

The drill screen will appear and you’ll see that it’s the exact situation that we set up:

The Lojack has raised preflop, we called on the Button, and a flop has come out. If we stay in this configuration, this drill allows us to practice this spot over and over, with a different flop coming out each time.

The flop comes Q-Q-9 rainbow and the Lojack bets 2.1. We now have the decision to Fold, Call, or Raise (with two different sizes we can use for the raise).

We decide to call, and the correct answer for the spot appears on the bottom right corner of the screen (circled in red in the screenshot below):

Lucid calls 99% of the time in this spot, so we got this one correct.

Because we set up a drill for one street here, the drill moves on to the next hand immediately.

For the particular drill we set up here, you're always on the Button facing a flop action from the Lojack in a single-raise pot. The Lojack can check or bet, and you’ll have to decide the appropriate action against your opponent’s decision.

Now that we’ve gone through a drill using preset options, let’s take a look at what you can do when you choose Custom from the Action menu.

You’ll find the Custom option here:

Clicking the Custom button will bring up the node navigator, where you can set up really hyper-specific scenarios to study.

For example, let’s say you want to keep studying the Lojack vs. Button single-raised pot scenario, but you want to practice specifically when the Lojack bets big on the flop.

Here’s how you would set up that drill:

Going through the node navigator, you set up a spot where the Lojack opens to 2.2 (Raise 2.2), and only the Button calls. To the right of the preflop nodes, you can now set up the Lojack to either check or bet in the drill.

You can select one of three sizes if you want to practice against a Lojack bet. We want to practice against a Bet 4.83 from the Lojack.

We select that bet size and a call from the Button, then click the green Start Drill button to begin the drill. The resulting drill is still a Lojack vs. Button SPR scenario, but the Lojack will always bet 4.83, and you’ll practice your response to that bet.

You can set up any specific preflop scenario with the Custom feature. Let’s look at one more, but this time we’re the Cutoff against a Big Blind opponent.

We set up a drill where we open from the Cutoff, the Big Blind calls, we c-bet for 1.77, and the Big Blind check-raises to 8.85 every time.

That drill could yield a spot like this:

No matter what the flop, you always c-bet small from the Cutoff and the Big Blind always responds with a 5x check-raise. The drill tasks you with choosing the right action against that big check-raise.

This is a fun spot with a set of sixes. We can choose to Fold, Call, Raise 19.1 or Raise 47.67. Let’s try the min-raise to 19.1 and see what happens:

This screen only appears if you make a massive EV error. In this case we can see that the small raise was big enough of a blunder to prompt this screen to come up.

Let’s take a look at one more feature in Custom Drills. After you’ve set up a drill, you can click the Filter Flops button (next to the Start Drill button) and choose specific filters for the flops you want to see on the board in the drill.

Here’s how the Filter Flops setup screen looks:

You can choose anywhere from one to three specific cards to appear on the flop.

Additionally, you can filter for unpaired, paired, and trips flops, as well as rainbow, two-tone, and monotone flops.

For example, if you wanted to drill for Ace-high, paired, rainbow flops, you could do so. Or choose to just drill random monotone flops. The possibilities are endless.

As of a recent update, you can also set hole card filters, allowing you to choose a specific hand or hand classes to drill.

There are countless Custom Drills that you can set up in Lucid, so if you’re ever not sure about how to play a specific spot, open up a Custom Drill, build what you want to practice, and get to work!