RTA for home games on PokerNow: a two-minute setup, and what you get

1. Before you start: ask the host

PokerNow games are private and the host decides what is allowed. Many study groups play with tools on purpose, to learn; many friendly games would consider it unfair. Ask, in the chat, before you share the table. The terms of GTO MAX AI require it, and so does common decency. A game where everyone can use the tool is also the best way to learn from it: the hands become a shared study session.

2. Setup

1. Open the PokerNow table in one Chrome window and app.gtomax.ai in another. Sign in with the username and password from Telegram.
2. Pick PokerNow as the site and your table size (heads-up, 6-max or 9-max).
3. Press Select and choose the PokerNow window in Chrome's share dialog. Share the window, not the whole screen, so nothing else is captured.
4. Press Start. Within a second or two the table card shows every seat with its name and stack, and the coach panel opens as a small window you keep over the table.
5. Play. Every time the action is on you the panel shows the GTO line with frequencies, the exploit line with its reason once it has twenty hands on a player, and the facts: equity, pot odds, the opponent's relevant numbers.

Nothing is installed. The same login works on any computer, and the hand history and player log follow it.

3. What the reader sees on PokerNow

PokerNow draws a clean table: the pot as a big number in the middle (the small "total" badge beside it is ignored), bets as yellow ovals in front of each player, salmon card backs for players in the hand, your own cards face up at the bottom, and a dealer disc. Between hands the client lays the table out afresh with "WAITING" plates, and the reader knows to wait with it. Amounts are read as big blinds when the table shows them and as chips otherwise. If the host changes the blinds mid-session, the reader follows the change.

4. The weekly game as a database

Home games have the property no online pool has: the same eight people, week after week. After three sessions the profile on each of them is better than any HUD stat from a thousand strangers, because every hand was against that person. The Players tab shows each one's tendencies with the sample behind them, the archetype the model assigned and its confidence, and the notes you wrote ("tilts after a bad beat", "never folds a flush draw"). The exploit line uses all of it. By the second month you are not playing the equilibrium against your friends; you are playing them.

5. Using it to teach

A study group gets the most out of it with one rule: everyone decides before looking. Then the hand is discussed with the two lines on screen. The GTO line settles arguments about theory; the exploit line, with its reason, starts the arguments worth having: is Mark really folding 70% to river bets, and if so why are you still checking back? The hand history keeps every decision, so the discussion can happen the next day too.

6. Limits

Multiway pots, which home games have more of than online cash, are handled by the rules engine rather than the solver, and the panel says so. Sizes outside the tree are mapped to the nearest one. And the reader is only as good as the window it sees: keep the table unobstructed, do not shrink it to a corner, and if a read is wrong press the report button so the frame reaches us.

The field compared, including where RTA is allowed and where it is not: the poker RTA guide.

More from the blog

• Is poker RTA detectable? How sites catch it in 2026
• GTO vs exploitative poker: when to leave the equilibrium, and by how much
• AI in poker: what RTA, bots and solvers actually do, and what they do not
• Playing GTO with real-time assistance: where the edge is, and where it is not

Longer reads: the poker RTA guide and all guides.