RTA stands for real-time assistance: anything that helps you decide while the hand is still being played. The term covers a friend whispering, a chart taped to the monitor, and software that reads the table and recommends a line. Rooms define it that broadly on purpose, and the definition is the whole story of where it is allowed.
The four kinds of real-time assistance
- Reference material. Preflop charts, push/fold tables, a notebook of ranges. Static, no software. Many rooms tolerate it quietly for recreational play; some, PokerStars among them, say charts during play are prohibited.
- Human help. A coach on a call, a group chat, a friend watching the screen. Old as online poker and banned by every room's "one player per hand" rule.
- Manual software. You type the spot into a solver or a Telegram bot and read the answer. rtapoker.com is this; so is alt-tabbing to GTO Wizard mid-hand. Slow, and detectable by timing patterns.
- Automatic software. The tool sees the table itself. Two ways to do that: capture the screen of one computer with another (rta.poker), or read a shared browser window in the browser you play in (GTO MAX AI). The second needs nothing installed and no calibration; the first needs a capture card and a second machine.
A poker bot is not RTA. A bot plays the account without a human; RTA advises a human who still makes every click. We keep a separate page on bots versus RTA because the two get conflated in forum threads and the consequences are different.
What RTA software actually does
Strip the marketing and a real-time tool has three jobs, and most tools do one.
- Read the state. Cards, board, stacks, bets, pot, button, who is still in. On a browser tool this is pixel reading of the shared window, several times a second, with a per-room reader because every client animates differently. On a capture-card tool it is OCR of a video feed. Everything downstream is only as good as this step, which is why we test it first on the comparison page.
- Solve the spot. Preflop from charts, postflop from a solver or a solved library. Any tool with a licence can do this; it is a commodity.
- Adjust for the opponent. The rare part. Equilibrium is the right answer against an equilibrium player, and nobody at a club table is one. A tool that keeps a model per player, with a confidence for each tendency, can tell you to fold the 55/45 call against the nit and call it against the player who bluffs the river half the time. In our testing only GTO MAX AI does this; HUDs give the raw statistics and leave you the arithmetic with the clock running.
How rooms detect it
Public rooms do not need to see your screen. They look at decision timing (humans take longer on hard spots, RTA users take the same time on every spot), at how closely a player's frequencies match solver output across thousands of hands, at mouse movement and window focus on desktop clients, and at reports from opponents. GGPoker partnered with GTO Wizard's security team in 2025 for the frequency analysis and in October 2026 banned all third-party software from running beside its client. PokerStars publishes its RTA bans and runs a zero-tolerance policy. The rooms' numbers for closed accounts and confiscated balances are public, and the sums are not small.
Where RTA is allowed
Not on public rooms for real money
Using real-time assistance on GGPoker, PokerStars, partypoker, 888 and the rest during real-money play breaks their terms and cheats the other players. We say so on every page of this site and the tool we publish asks you to accept the same before it opens a table.
It is allowed, or a matter of house rules, in private clubs and home games that set their own policy, on play-money and training tables, in hand review after a session, and in coaching sessions where the overlay is the teaching aid. That is a real market, and it is the one the browser-based coaches are built for: a club game on PokerNow or a ClubGG union where the host has said study aids are fine.
RTA, solvers, HUDs, trainers: one line each
| Category | During a hand? | Sees the table? | Example |
|---|---|---|---|
| RTA software | Yes | Yes (automatic) or no (manual) | GTO MAX AI, rta.poker, rtapoker.com |
| Solver | No | No | PioSOLVER, GTO+, GTO Wizard |
| Trainer | No | No | GTO Wizard Trainer, PokerSnowie |
| HUD / tracker | Stats only | Reads hand-history files | Hand2Note, PokerTracker 4 |
| Poker bot | Plays for you | Yes | banned everywhere |
What to look for if you are choosing one
Ask three questions and most of the market answers itself. Does it read the table without you typing? Does the advice change with the opponent? What do you have to install, wire or calibrate before the first hand? The comparison desk puts any three tools side by side on exactly those, and the GTO MAX AI guide to poker RTA goes further into how a browser coach reads a shared window.