Blog
Notes from the table — what shipped, what changed, and the occasional hand worth talking about.
10 November 2026
A poker solitaire you can always finish, and how we know
Pip’s Poker Solitaire Puzzle puts all 25 cards face up and asks for 90% of a grid Pip has already made with the same cards, so every puzzle can be solved. Over a year of Daily puzzles, a search more than five times longer beat Pip’s own grid on 178 days of 365. Why the target is 90% of a good grid, not the best one.
5 November 2026
A poker rating that ignores whether you won the hand
The Pip Rating grades each call, fold and opening move on the cards you could see, so a bad beat costs nothing. 1,000 gives away 2.5% of what was at stake, and every halving is 350 points. Calling everything and folding everything both rate about 400. What the server checks, and what it cannot.
30 October 2026
Set mining needs a deep stack. How long each table gives you one
A pocket pair flops its third card 2,304 times in 19,600, so calling a raise to three big blinds needs about 26 big blinds behind, on both sides, to break even. Pip’s ladder tables keep that for 18 to 20 hands. Deep Stack keeps it for 60 to 84. Counted from each table’s own blinds.
29 October 2026
Calling a river bet: when the answer depends on who is betting
A bet of half the pot needs you to win one time in four, and a pot-sized bet one in three. Whether your pair does depends on how often they bluff. We dealt 40,000 hands through Pip’s river drill: about one river decision in four is right against one player and wrong against another.
27 October 2026
The most you can bet in Pot-Limit Omaha
You may raise by the size of the pot after you call. At 25 and 50 blinds the first raise is 175, then 600, 2,050 and 7,000, and the fifth is all-in from 200 big blinds. The shortcut players use, why it is out by a blind for the blinds, and the flop.
26 October 2026
The house edge in Blackjack when you can only hit or stand
Pip’s Blackjack has no doubling and no splitting, and each table states its house edge. We played 40 million hands a table to check: one card was right and two said the house took more than it does. The numbers, what each rule is worth, and the whole strategy in a paragraph.
22 October 2026
Turn-based poker with friends who are never free at once
A slow game on Pip is a private Hold’em table where each move gets 1 to 24 hours, and your clock stops during your quiet hours. Moves set in advance, a replay of what you missed, and a notification when it is your turn. Any free account can host one at a time; friends join free.
20 October 2026
How often is there a low in Omaha Hi-Lo?
Six boards in ten allow a low. One hand makes one a little over a third of the time, and ace-deuce a little under half. Counted over every deal, checked against the evaluator that settles Pip’s Hi-Lo pots, and how the odds change with six hands at the table.
19 October 2026
A poker night with friends, online, with nothing to settle up
One person opens a private room on Pip and sends a link; everyone else joins free with an account. Up to four seats free, up to eight with camera and voice in a member’s room, and chips that are not money. What the host sets, and what happens when somebody gets up.
15 October 2026
How often both your cards play in Hold’em
We counted all 2,809,475,760 Hold’em deals. Both hole cards make the best five in 1,324,680,512 of them, a little under half. One card does it more often, and in one deal in twenty the board plays. Worked hands, and when two different fives are both right.
14 October 2026
Five-Card Draw: what the number of cards gives away
In Five-Card Draw the only tell is how many cards somebody asks for. Every one of the 2,598,960 five-card hands, dealt through the rule Pip’s Draw regulars throw by, and what each number means.
12 October 2026
Your cards stay on the server
In single-player Pip the whole deck is in your browser. At a multiplayer table that would let anyone read your cards, so our server deals and sends each player only what they may see. The test that checks every step, the one that keeps the AI players honest, and what it does not do.
8 October 2026
A beginner beat our hardest table by betting
The Main Event folded 71% of checked flops to a two-thirds pot bet, where 40% already pays. A player two months into poker found it before we did. What the bots remember now.
6 October 2026
Why a flush beats a full house in Short Deck
Short Deck throws out the deuces through fives, and the hand order moves to match. Every five- and seven-card hand on a thirty-six card deck, counted by the evaluator that settles Pip’s Short Deck pots.
5 October 2026
Omaha’s exactly-two rule, in five hands
In Pot-Limit Omaha you hold four cards and must play exactly two with three from the board. Five hands where that changes the answer, checked against the evaluator that settles Pip’s Omaha pots, and how big a pot-limit raise can be.
4 October 2026
What Google and Apple tell us when you sign in
Pip accounts can now be made with Google or Apple. Both send us your email and an id, Google adds your name and picture, Apple your name once. We never show or use them.
2 October 2026
Pot odds when you can’t cover the bet
Facing a bet bigger than your stack, you pay less than the bet and play for less than the pot. Our session review got both halves wrong and called a fold that cost four big blinds a good one. The right sum, worked through one spot.
30 September 2026
Deal me in dealt you a menu
In September, 68 of the 217 people who made a player on Pip did not play a hand within the hour. The tour was not why. The button that said Deal me in opened the lobby, and now it opens a table.
29 September 2026
Pip has a membership now
£5.99 a month or £49 a year, for multiplayer, the lessons, the drills and more. The ladder, the Rail, the Daily and the freeroll stay free.
17 September 2026
The mock-ups on your landing page are untested claims
Our home page draws four small pictures of what the game produces. Three were typed out by hand and all three had drifted: a share line missing the address that makes it a loop, a hand permalink six characters long on the card that says there is no server, and an equity read labelled with a phrase the game has never emitted, over a percentage its own caption contradicted. Why the suite stayed green, and the two ways to draw your own output that are true by construction.
16 September 2026
Your Cloudflare Pages site is on Google twice
Cloudflare noindexes preview deployments and says nothing about the production pages.dev alias, which serves your whole site on a second host. Ours did, for five weeks, with a correct canonical tag on every page. The two-line rule that fixed it, why it is not a redirect, and the test that stops the same file deindexing the real domain.
15 September 2026
A route missing from your sitemap is not noindexed
Leaving a URL out of the sitemap instructs nobody. Ours never listed the game, Google indexed it anyway under the home page’s title, and the fix we shipped covered one route and missed thirty-two. What replaced it: every route is published, noindex, or written down with a reason.
14 September 2026
How accurate is a poker equity calculator? We checked ours against an answer we could count
Every sampled equity number carries an error bar, and almost nobody prints one or tests it. There is exactly one spot where the true answer is countable. Here is what 100 runs against it say about the band we print.
2 September 2026
August: what shipped
Six written guides, a free odds calculator, a drill that marks your answer, a card at the end of a tournament, and the month we measured our own bots and published our own errors.
28 August 2026
Five things pokersolver does that its README does not mention
Its cards array can hand you seven cards for a five-card hand, an ace playing low comes back with the value 1, and a royal flush is named “Straight Flush”. Each one with the input that produces it.
24 August 2026
Everything we have published that was wrong
Every false claim we have shipped: what each one said, how long it served, how we found it, and the test that now fails if it comes back. The newest one is a sentence in this post.
20 August 2026
Verify today’s deal yourself
Everyone playing the Daily gets the same shuffle. Here are the six steps that produce it, a snippet that runs anywhere, and one day’s deck to check yourself against.
4 August 2026
Two devices, two chip counts
Pip now has an optional account that carries your progress to a second device. The interesting part isn’t the sign-in, it’s what happens when both devices have been played.
26 July 2026
Pip, for readers who aren’t people
Every content page now answers Accept: text/markdown with its plain text version — a free-plan build of what Cloudflare offers as Markdown for Agents, in about ninety lines.
25 July 2026
Launch week: what shipped
A new card back, four more hand nicknames, a quicker freeroll, and three strangers in the credits — everything that changed in Pip’s first days in the open.
25 July 2026
Pip is live, and it’s open source
Single-player Texas Hold’em with no account needed, no ads, and no real money — now live at playpip.io, with the whole codebase in the open.
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