With more and more new players jumping on the poker bandwagon every day and new poker ‘wunderkinder’ breaking through on a regular basis, online poker, predominantly at the higher levels, has become more competitive than ever before. As a result, many established players are constantly on the lookout for a way to gain an edge over their opponents. One of these ways is using PokerTracker software.
PokerTracker is a third-party program that can be installed to run alongside your poker room software and offers a number of convenient tools to track and analyze your poker game. First, the program tracks all the hands you play online, either directly from the poker room or from files you request from the poker room and then import manually. It then goes on to analyze your game with respect to winnings/losses and how tight/aggressive you play. It can even show you how you play in different positions, whether you raise/fold too much and with what hands you win/lose the most money.
Thanks to the Heads-Up Display (HUD) feature, you can now not only track your own game, but also receive real time information on how your opponents play. HUD will allow you to see every statistic imaginable for all the players at your table and help you realize whether the guy to your right is a fish or if you should better stay out of his way. Another interesting feature is the TableTracker, which scans all the tables on the lobby screen of your poker room and helps you find the best seats available. The newest version, PokerTracker 3, now works for all Texas Holdem and Omaha poker tables and can also combine hand histories from various poker sites into one database, so even if you decide to try out a new game or move to another poker room, you won’t have to relinquish all your precious stats.
In our editors’ personal opinion, while PokerTracker might come in handy for established players found at the higher limits (where even the smallest edge can make a huge difference) he wouldn’t recommend using these kinds of poker tools if you are still a { beginning poker player. Until you have acquired the skills necessary to compete at the higher limits, you should focus your attention on improving your game and making your own reads on your opponents, rather than becoming reliant on a piece of software to do all the playing for you.