If you're looking for the right poker tools to help you at the online poker tables, look no further! Poker tools and software serve several purposes like helping you track your results, improve your game, and increase your profitability at the table.
There are plenty of different ways that poker software can help your poker career. Poker trackers allow you to accurately assess your performance and analyze hand histories. Solvers can guide your overall poker strategy, provide a rough sense of the GTO play in a given spot or group of spots, and help you account for ICM (Independent Chip Model).
These five tools are some of the best-loved, most useful, and well-established poker tools on the market today. They range in cost and complexity, but every one of them has proven its usefulness in the poker software market.
With this tool, you can enter your hole cards along with the hole cards of up to nine opponents. The PokerNews Poker Odds Calculator will tell you the percentage chance of each hand winning at the showdown given a particular board.
Select the hand of the player you want to enter and use the card table on the right to select the value and suit of each card. Do the same for all the other players in the hand. If you want to calculate flop or turn equity, then it's just a matter of adding in the board using the same card table.
The PokerNews Poker Odds Calculator player will then give you the percentage chance of each hand winning beneath the relevant player's name. The box at the bottom will also give you a simple readout of your hand's equity against the other hands you entered.
The PokerNews Poker Odds Calculator is completely free to use! It costs absolutely nothing and is on the house from us. All you need is an internet connection and a device with a web browser installed.
PokerTracker 4 is a piece of software that tracks your online poker hands for you and has plenty of powerful features that allow you to use that data to analyze your performance, direct your study, and get reads on your opponents in real time (at least on those sites that still allow HUDs).
Once installed, you need to link it to your online poker accounts and give it access to the hand history folders on your hard drive. Then, when you play online, PokerTracker 4 will work in the background, helping you track the hours you play, your wins, losses, and all-in EV, and the patterns of your opponent's play.
PokerTracker 4 has several price points starting from $64.99. The cheapest version allows you to use PT4 on small stakes tables, one of either Holdem or Omaha tables. Additional price points exist for an "all stakes" version and a combined Omaha and Holdem tracker.
Holdem Manager 3 is PokerTracker 4's direct competitor and provides a slightly less powerful platform but with greater ease of use. HM3 tracks your sessions for you and provides the poker tools to analyze the data it collects. It can also create a heads-up display on many of the sites where HUDs are allowed.
Professional poker players have used Holdem Manager 3 for years to play at the best poker sites that allow this software. Famously, PokerStars is one of the sites that allows the usage of this excellent tool.
ICMIZER 3 is a piece of poker strategy software that takes a pre-flop tournament position and calculates the correct push-fold play for that spot using an independent chip model to calculate the most profitable moves.
The independent chip model is a way of converting the chip EV of a tournament strategy into $EV. ICMIZER 3 uses ICM to create a chart of a simple push-fold strategy for any tournament position you enter.
While you can use ICMIZER 3 to quickly check what the correct move was in a specific circumstance, what makes it especially powerful is that you can quickly run a bunch of similar spots with different parameters to work out how different dynamics affect your overall strategy.
ICMIZER 3 is a browser-based online poker tool that can be used without download. To analyze a position, you can manually enter all the details of the tournament and hand, including chip stacks, number of players, and payout structure, or you can upload that information from a specific hand or tournament history.
It uses a mix of database of positions that have been pre-solved and access to a powerful solver. Using these tools, GTO Wizard provides you with learning materials that range from simple pre-flop charts to full training suites in which you can study in-depth positions and play against a GTO opponent with instant feedback.
GTO Wizard has a large range of tools and software built into it. After signing up, players are best advised to follow the various tutorials that will allow them to get to grips with the relatively advanced tools this poker software provides.
You can also purchase various monthly subscriptions that are specific to the type of game you want to study. These run from $29 per month for a "Starter" Heads Up SNG package up to $129 Elite packages that allow you to set parameters on the solver yourself and give you up to 150,000 hands to solve each month.
Poker odds calculators are relatively simple tools that will tell you the winning chances of a hand or set of hands. Good examples are th PokerNews Poker Odds Calculator and Open Poker Tools' Range v Range Equity Calculator.
In a typical odds calculator, you enter information about your hand, your opponent's hand, and the board, then the calculator tells you what the winning chances of each hand is at that point in the hand.
Odds calculators help you work out what hands play well against each other, sharpen your ability to estimate equity on the fly, and can be used to check the pot odds and expected value of a given situation.
Although the goal of a solver is to provide true GTO, the limits of computing power and complexity of no-limit betting mean that solver outputs are more like good estimates of the GTO strategy. Even so, these estimates are good enough to be the major force guiding strategy at the top of modern poker.
PioSolver is popular with players who focus on heads-up strategy. This powerful tool allows you to calculate heads-up Nash equilibria or nodelock an opponent's strategy to figure out the best exploitative play.
PokerSnowie is a poker analytical tool that has built its GTO estimates using neural networks to estimate GTO in a much wider range of spots. As a result, it is faster, more flexible, and more comprehensive than most other solvers, but this comes at the cost in the accuracy of its GTO strategy estimates.
Poker trackers are tools that track and analyze your poker sessions. The best-known software like PokerTracker 4 and Holdem Manager 3 automatically record online poker sessions, but there are also other apps that allow you to track live sessions by entering the data manually.
Poker trackers are tools that automatically track your online poker hands, recording your win rates, session times, and even your opponents' hands. The tracker then allows you to pore over this data in a wide range of ways including results graphs and HUD readouts.
You can then use the software tools to produce results graphs and to look at data for specific hand types, game types, table positions, and opponents. In this way, poker tracking software allows you to get an objective sense of your performance as a poker player and to analyze patterns and weaknesses within your play and your opponents.
Poker Bankroll Tracker is the best live poker tracker on the market, allowing you to track things like session length, buy-in, and key hands. It also comes with a built-in odds calculator and is suited to both cash and tournament players.
Heads-up displays or poker HUDs overlay important information about your opponents onto your online poker tables. Once a vital part of every professional's toolset, HUDs have become less ubiquitous as many of the biggest sites have banned them.
This information allows you to quantify key aspects of your opponent's play like what percentage of hands they play preflop and how often they raise or reraise on each street. Since the data usually comes from your own hand histories, the more you play with an opponent the better the data you have on them.
Once you have set up your poker tracker and HUD to work together with your online poker software, all you have to do is open an online poker table. The HUD will appear with a string of statistics beneath each opponent's name.
Poker professional Jonathan Little, who writes regular strategy content at PokerNews, has created a video to understand how to set up the right HUD (Heads-Up Display) to crush your opponents.
Holdem Manager 3 and PokerTracker 4 are by far the most popular and highest-quality poker HUDs on the market today. Their popularity has meant both a significant investment in constant improvements and a lot of user feedback.
Alternatively, DriveHUD is a more recent addition to the HUD market, which aims to be as intuitive and simple to use as possible. In the process is sacrifices some of the power that comes with HM3 and PT4. However, it may be worth looking at if you find the more established brands a bit intimidating.
The short answer is: yes, but only some of them, and sometimes. Tools like trackers are considered a standard tool for record-keeping in online poker and are almost universally allowed both by the terms and conditions of poker sites and by the poker world's sense of what is socially acceptable.
No. While an algorithm is theoretically possible, we are a long way from working it out. Some very simple games like heads up limit holdem are close to solved, but most of the games you will actually play in your poker career are still far from it.
This depends on your level and the type of poker you play. Tournament players will get a lot out of ICMIZER 3 while cash game players might want to look at the software provided by sites like GTO Wizard.
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