Poker Skill Test: 9 Decisions to Place Your Game
This poker skill test gives you 9 real game situations, grouped into 3 difficulty tiers: beginner, intermediate, advanced. Each tier has 3 questions, and you pass it with at least 2 correct answers. Your level is the last tier you pass, in order. The test measures your decisions rather than your vocabulary, and it is free to take right on this page, with no account.
The test
Reading your result
| Tiers passed | Your level | Next step |
|---|---|---|
| none | beginner, still building | poker positions and the starting hands chart |
| beginner | solid beginner | the poker quiz, then the continuation bet |
| beginner + intermediate | intermediate | pot odds and turn-river play |
| all three | advanced | the trainer's advanced heads-up and 6‑max spots |
The three tiers reuse the difficulty tags of the trainer's library. Counted on 15 October 2026 over its 647 puzzles (we grouped each one by its difficulty tag and by the street of the decision), 158 are tagged beginner, 230 intermediate and 259 advanced, and the test draws 3 questions from each tier. Every beginner puzzle is a preflop or flop decision, while 111 advanced ones are on the turn and 133 on the river, so passing the advanced tier mostly means handling the later streets (the tags are the author's judgment, not a difficulty measured on players).
What a skill test measures, and what it doesn't
A serious skill test measures decisions in specific situations, because that is what separates players at the table. Researchers at the University of Lethbridge validated a questionnaire of this kind, the Poker Skills Measure: 35 items, a one-week test-retest reliability of 0.82, and scores linked to real results. This test is shorter: it places you; it doesn't give you a precise ranking. Take it again after a few weeks of work to measure your progress.
The common mistake: confusing skill with results
Winning one session says almost nothing about your level: variance dominates over a few hundred hands. A decision test does not depend on the cards that come next. That is why it measures your game better than a session report.
Keep going
- A work plan for your tier: how to get better at poker.
- Train on spots like these: our free poker trainer.
- Work on a weak spot by theme: the preflop quiz, the c‑bet quiz or what would you do in these poker hands on the river.
- Training on your phone: how to choose a poker training app.
- Train level by level: poker puzzles.
- Keep the habit every day: the daily poker puzzle.
- Adapting your answer to the opponent's profile: exploitative poker.
Sources
- Questions from the curated Poker Puzzle Trainer corpus (October 10, 2026).
- Poker Skills Measure (PSM), University of Lethbridge: opus.uleth.ca.
- Carrie A. Leonard, Characteristics of good and poor poker players, thesis, University of Lethbridge (2013), where the PSM was built and validated: opus.uleth.ca.
- Answers follow rules written by the app's author; they are not solver outputs.