How it works

How the app works, screen by screen. Exploit Lab trains one habit: narrowing your opponent's range every time they act. Here's how a hand goes and what each screen is telling you.

Your first hand
Reading their range
The reveal
Your decisions
Difficulty
Villains
Learning a villain
Handy extras

Your first hand

On the Play tab, tap Change to pick a villain (or Random villain for a different one each hand) and Edit to pick a difficulty. Then tap the big Play button.

You're the seat marked You; your opponent is marked Villain, and their name is in the red pill at the top left. You get any hand in any seat, and you play the preflop yourself: the other seats post blinds or fold, the villain acts by their ranges, and when it's your turn you fold, call or raise.

Before any cards, the villain could be holding many different hands: that's their range. To see where they start, tap Change on the Play tab, then Ranges next to any villain. Each time they act, their range narrows to the hands that fit what they did.

When they act, the button at the bottom says Make your read. That's your cue: you read their range first, then make your own decision, on every street including preflop.

Think first. Before you tap, ask yourself: which hands in their range would do that? Keep those, drop the rest. Then make your read. At a real table there's no grid to paint, so this is the habit that counts.

The first time you play, a few short tips walk you through the hand. You can bring them back any time in Settings → Show the tutorial again.

The table on the flop: the LAG has checked, and a Make your read button sits at the bottom. — The villain checks the flop. Time to read their range.

Reading their range

Preflop, everyone paints the grid. After the flop there are three ways to read, from quick to exact; your difficulty decides which one you use. To pick one yourself, tap Edit on the Play tab, then Customize → Read with.

Preflop: the grid, with shortcuts

When the villain opens, limps or 3-bets, paint the hands you think they play that way on the 13×13 grid. Buttons under the grid paint a whole group at once (big pairs, big suited aces, broadways…); then adjust the edges of the range cell by cell. Tap a button again to clear its group. Thinking in the grid is the habit worth building from your first hand.

Buckets (Beginner, after the flop)

Every hand they could hold falls into one of five kinds: value (strong made hands), medium pairs, weak pairs, draws and air. Pick the kinds that make up most of their range right now. If it's split, pick more than one.

Open Their preflop range to look back at what they started with.

Estimate (Grinder)

Give a rough percentage for each of the five kinds, and about how many combos their whole range holds. It's closer to how you'd think it through at the table.

Grid (Pro)

Paint every hand you think they have on the 13×13 chart of starting hands: pairs on the diagonal, suited hands above it, offsuit below. Tap a cell, or drag to paint many.

The small number on a cell is how many combos of that hand are still possible once you count the cards you can see. A pair has 6 combos, a suited hand 4 and an offsuit hand 12.
Reset puts the grid back the way it started; Clear empties it.

A bucket read on the flop: Medium pairs and Air are ticked. — Buckets: what is their range mostly made of?

A preflop grid read: pairs, big aces and broadways painted with the group shortcuts under the grid. — Grid: paint every hand they could have. The shortcuts paint a group at once.

The reveal

The villain follows known rules, so the app always knows their real range. The reveal shows it and scores your read against it.

On the grid

Green: in both. You read it and they have it.
Orange, marked −: they have it and you left it out.
Blue, marked +: you included it, but they don't have it.

Below the grid you get their range, your read and how many combos matched, missed or were extra. Your read score (0–100) is the overlap between the two: painting too much costs you as much as missing hands.

With buckets

You see their real range on the grid, what most of it was made of and whether your pick was right, mostly right, partly right or off. The bar at the bottom splits their range into the five kinds.

Study the misses. The colors tell you what to fix: orange means you threw out hands they really play that way, blue means you kept hands their action rules out.

By default the reveal comes after every street. On Pro it waits for the end of the hand, so you have to keep reading without feedback, like at a real table.

A preflop reveal: green hands you read, orange hands you left out, and a read score of 47. — Green: hands you read right. Orange: hands they open that you left out (here the suited aces, connectors and weaker offsuit hands).

Your decisions

Your actions are scored too, against what they really hold, not just against your own cards.

When you call or fold a bet, the app works out your equity against their real range and the pot odds you were getting. The verdict is Fine, or a clear mistake when you called with less than half the equity you needed or folded with more than double it. Close spots are never called mistakes.

Bets, raises and checks show their numbers but don't get a verdict yet.

Preflop decisions

Every preflop decision is graded against a chart: the TAG's by default, or your own ranges (Settings → Grade my preflop against). Right when the chart plays your hand that way; otherwise too loose (you played a hand it folds), too tight (you folded a hand it plays) or wrong action (you called a hand it raises, or the other way round). The summary lists each one under Your preflop; after a fold you see the verdict for a moment and the next hand deals.

How much math you see depends on the Math setting:

Off: just the verdict.
Equity: adds how often your hand wins against their range, and what you needed to call.
Odds + EV: adds the expected value of each choice, your equity when they continue, and how their range would respond to your bet.

A bucket reveal: their real range on the grid, Partly right, and your bet with its equity underneath. — A bucket reveal, with your decision underneath.

Difficulty

Three presets, or tap Edit on the Play tab, open Customize and set each one yourself. Every setting has a ? that explains it.

Setting	Beginner	Grinder	Pro
Read with	Buckets	Estimate	Grid
Board labels	On	Changes	Off
Shot clock	Off	30s	15s
Math	Off	Equity	Odds + EV
Reveal	Each street	Each street	End of hand

Board labels: short tags under the board, like "Two-tone, connected, wet". Changes only says what a new card changed ("Flush possible"); Off leaves the board to you.
Shot clock: a time limit for each read and action. When it runs out, whatever is on screen is submitted and marked "timed out".

Villains

Each villain is modeled on a real low-stakes player type: the Nit, the TAG, the LAG, the Calling Station, the Maniac and the Short Stacker. Tap Change on the Play tab, then Ranges next to any of them, to see their preflop charts. Guide opens how to beat them.

Their ranges show as one grid per spot: red what they raise, green what they call, the rest they fold.

One way per hand

Like the low-stakes players they're modeled on, each villain plays a given hand the same way every time and uses one standard bet size. Every hand is either in their range or out of it: your job is to spot the habit and punish it, not to guess at frequencies.

Random villain

Pick Random villain at the end of the list to face a different player type each hand, the way a real table changes. Their name is in the pill at the top left. Turn on Guess who to hide it, work out the type from how they play, and name them at the end of the hand.

Learning a villain

Learn one villain at a time, easiest first: the Nit, the TAG, the Calling Station, the LAG, the Maniac, then the Short Stacker.

Your villain to learn: the card on the Play tab shows who you're studying and how close you are to mastering them. You've mastered a villain when you've finished any lessons they have, know every one of their quiz spots and score 80 or better over your last 100 reads.
Lessons: short reads, one habit each. Each ends in a drill that jumps straight to that moment in a hand.
Daily quiz: about 4 minutes of painting their ranges from memory. Spots you miss come back sooner.
Guides: the Learn tab has short reads on ranges, board textures, pot odds and exploiting each player type, plus a glossary. Tap any underlined word to see what it means.

Handy extras

History and Stats: every hand you play is saved. History lets you replay any hand. Stats shows your read scores by street, villain, board and pot type, your strongest and weakest spots, your preflop decisions (share right, VPIP and PFR next to the chart's), and your streak.
Daily goal and streak: play your goal each day (10 hands to start; change it in Settings) to build a streak. Hands that reach the flop count; quick preflop folds don't.
Your playable hands: Settings → Your playable hands sets your own range for every preflop spot, red to raise and green to call. Use them to deal only hands you'd play, or to grade your preflop against your own chart.
Hand codes: tap the seed on any summary to copy a code for that exact hand. Anyone can paste it into Settings → Load a hand to play the same hand.
Report a problem: the flag at the top of the table sends us a note with the hand attached, so we can see exactly what you saw.
Your account: sign in under Settings with your email to keep your hands and stats on every device. Download my data saves everything as a file; Delete account removes it all.
Install it: add Exploit Lab to your home screen from your browser's menu and it opens like an app, full screen, even offline.
On a laptop: the table sits beside your read, and the keyboard works: F to fold, C or K to check or call, B or R to bet or raise, 1–5 for the bet sizes, and Enter to continue.

Ready to try it?

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