Champion of Poker

To beat the Texas Hold’em Poker players you encounter online you need to constantly review your sessions and take the lessons from this review into your future games. A great program to use for this type of session review is pokertracker. I use Pokertracker and it does the job for me in terms of my hand session reviews.

The great thing about Pokertracker for users is the automation. You can set up the poker hands to be downloaded to a certain folder on your computer at the end of each session from your poker room and then when the Pokertracker software is ran it automatically imports the hands into your database. This means whenever you run the tracking software you have the latest information available to you. This allows instant review of your own hands.

You can filter your hands per opponent to try and improve against a certain opponent that you find yourself unable to beat. If you notice an opponent keep appearing on your tables then there is a good chance that they are following you. They will not be following you because they believe you are better than them. Imagine how great it will be to identify their playing style and work out how to beat them thanks to analysis conducted on Pokertracker. It will be difficult for a player to classify you as better than them once they have made the decision that you are a weak player.

When Pokertracker first hit the market there was a cry of fear from many players. Read any Pokertracker article from around 2007 and you will see pleas for the banning of the software. Online poker has now reached a level where to not use this sort of data mining poker software when you are a regular cash game player is to give up an edge to your opponents. You can define a recreational player as someone who does not put this effort in behind the scenes. My professional poker friend has a set time each day for hand review. He says without this hand review he would not be a winning player. From a player who has made a living from playing online poker for seven years this is quite an admission.

There are programs that you can buy to relay the stats in a heads up display (HUD) that is visible on the tables whilst you are playing. For multi-table poker players in cash games this is vital as you cannot watch and remember everything about each player when you are playing so many tables but the stats tell you all you need to know at a glance. Opponents pre-flop aggression rating lets you know what sort of hands they like to play, the continuation bet rating gives you numerical data on how often a continuation bet is made and so on.

The more you use this software the more useful it is to you as statistics gain credence the more data you have. For a player playing many hands the value of Pokertracker increases over time. You can buy hand histories from places like pokertableratings.com to bolster your records. Some players believe this is not an ethical way of using the software but if you feel that it is, there are products and databases for sale for around $100.

Pokertracker is something that I am using in my cash games and now that I have set up the software to mine my hands into the program it is ready whenever I need it. Looking through my hands is quite fun using a user-friendly program like this. Give it a try and stop giving an edge to your opponents by not doing your Poker homework after your sessions. Your bankroll will reap the benefits of this effort.

By Malcolm Clarke