Recommended Poker Software

Before embarking on your poker career, it may help to look through the following list of software. These are the most commonly used programs by successful poker players. They will help you to gain an edge over the increasingly competitive field.

Poker-Tracker / Holdem Manager

The most commonly used software to aid poker-players is tracking software such as “Poker-Tracker” or “Holdem Manager”.

This software will keep track of any hands you play online allowing you to keep an eye on your wins/losses.

 There are a huge variety of other things you can do with the information however.

You can run various filters on your collected data. Perhaps you want to know how many hands you’ve played at a specific stake, or which hands are making you the most money. You can find where you are making mistakes or losing money. You can also use it to find weaknesses in your opponents game which you will be able to exploit next time you are at the table.

You can also look back over specific hands you played in a session in the hand-history re-player. This will allow you to make additional notes on your opponents and see if you had the pot-odds / equity to make various calls.

 PokerStove

This useful piece of software will allow you to calculate your equity against certain hands and certain ranges.

 Perhaps you want to know if a recent play you made was profitable. Plug in your hole cards, the board texture, and your opponents hand or estimated range. Once you’d done this, click “evaluate” and PokerStove will tell you how much equity you had.

PokerStove can be used to help train your awareness of equity in certain spots. For example what is the equity of top pair against a range of sets, flush draws, and second pairs in a certain scenario? Make an estimate of what you think your equity is, then use PokerStove to see how accurate you are.

 Flopzilla

Flopzilla goes one step further and allows you to calculate how hard various ranges hit certain flops. Select the range of starting hands you think your opponent has, input the specific flop + any dead cards, and Flopzilla will calculate what percentage of the time your opponent has made certain hands.

 It should mainly be used for post-game analysis seeing as it takes a little while to input the data. It can definitely help you to practice putting people on ranges and deciding whether various board textures are good for them. You may find you thought a certain board was good for your opponent, but after some analysis you realise he rarely hits it.

 TableScannner

Some poker-clients have built in table-selection and waiting-list features that are easy to use and will get you on the tables you want to join very quickly. Others don’t however; and this is where TableScan Turbo comes in. TableScan Turbo will scan the lobby of your poker client and list all available games at a specified stake. You can then filter those tables by number of players, waiting list size, number of shortstackers, number of multitablers, average pot, players/flop etc. You can even integrate TableScan Turbo with your tracking software allowing you to find the softest tables while avoiding the regulars.

Once you have found the tables you like, you can join the waiting-list from inside the TableScan Turbo client. It will even open the tables for you if there is a spare seat. You can join a whole list of waiting-lists at once; no need to click on every single table as you might have to do from within the poker-client. Simply highlight all the tables you want to join and click “join waiting lists”.

Searching for good tables and joining waiting lists can be very time-consuming if you are a multi-tabler. It can also be very distracting if you are trying to find good tables while playing poker-hands on the tables you have already joined. TableScan Turbo goes a long way in limiting the hassle of getting on tables.

 TableNinja

This is must-have software for any players contemplating mass-multitabling. It adds coloured boxes around your tables when it is your turn to act – you don’t waste time looking at tables where no action is happening.

 It also has a large amount of betting scripts which will automatically input certain bet-sizes into your bet-box. Often it means making a bet will involve only one mouse-click rather than several because your preferred size in various situations has already been input.

TableNinja will also automatically take a seat and buy in to any tables you open. It will also check “post big-blinds” option for you amongst a variety of other options.

Even if you are only single-tabling TableNinja may be able to offer something useful, but for those die-hard multi-tablers who insist on playing 24 tables whilst playing Starcraft on their other monitor, TableNinja is software you can’t do without.