Why I built HeroCall

I play $1/3 and $2/5 live cash for fun, not for a living.

I'm not a professional poker player. I'm not a coach. I'm just a player who wanted to get better.

Like a lot of live players, I spent plenty of time reading about poker. Strategy articles, books, videos, forums, hand breakdowns. I learned a lot. But eventually I noticed something: learning poker theory and getting better at your own decisions are two different things. The missing piece was reviewing what actually happened at the table. That's why I built HeroCall.

The part of poker nobody was helping me with

I started reviewing my own hands the usual way. I'd post them on online forums and get a bunch of different opinions, often leaving me more confused than when I started. Solvers were useful for some spots, but overwhelming — and not particularly helpful for the multi-way pots, limped pots, and other situations that come up all the time in low-stakes live cash.

I'd leave the casino, remember an interesting hand, and try to reconstruct it later. What were the stacks again? How much did I bet on the flop? Was that player actually tight, or had I just decided he was tight? Had he been raising a lot, or did it only feel that way because of the hand I was thinking about? I started taking notes at the table because I didn't want to forget the hands before I had a chance to review them.

And then came the hardest part: figuring out whether I had actually made a good decision. Usually I'd come up with a few possible explanations, but I had no good way of knowing which explanation was actually the right one. That wasn't particularly useful.

Online poker has had a huge advantage here for years. The hand history is recorded automatically. You can replay the hand, run it through a tracker, compare it with other hands, and gradually build a picture of where you're making mistakes. Live poker doesn't work that way. You leave the table with a memory, a feeling and maybe a few notes on your phone.

HeroCall is the tool I wanted for the part in between playing and improving.

You tell it what happened the way you'd tell a friend. HeroCall turns that messy description into a structured hand, lets you check that it got the details right, and then walks through the decision with you. You can question the review, push back on it, add something you forgot, change a read, and look at the hand again.

The goal isn't to give you a magic answer. It's to make reviewing your own poker a habit.

Why live cash is different

HeroCall is built around the kind of poker I actually play: live cash games. That means the messy stuff matters. Straddles. Limped pots. Weird bet sizes. Deep stacks. A player you've watched for two hours suddenly waking up. The guy who hasn't played a hand all night. Table dynamics that never make it into a clean online hand history. Those things are part of the decision.

So HeroCall isn't designed around an idealized poker table where every player has a perfectly defined range and every action fits neatly into a database. It's designed for the game you actually sit down in front of.

Your poker, over time

The hand reviewer is only part of the idea. I want HeroCall to become a place where a live player can gradually build a record of their own game. The hands you play today shouldn't disappear when you walk out of the casino.

Over time, they should become a searchable record of your decisions: the spots you keep getting wrong, the situations you're unsure about, the reads you tend to make, and the lessons you've already learned once and don't want to learn again. That's the feedback loop I was missing when I started taking the game more seriously.

Play. Remember. Review. Learn. Play again.

HeroCall is built to close that loop.

Built by a player, for players

HeroCall isn't trying to replace a good poker coach, solve poker, or tell you that every decision has one objectively correct answer. Poker is too messy for that. It's a tool for players who enjoy the game and want to understand their decisions a little better.

That's me. And if that's you too, I hope HeroCall gives you the same thing I wanted when I started building it: a better way to learn from the hands you actually play.