Poker School - Lesson 7 | Useful Software

What really makes online poker different from it's real life counterpart is the player's ability to use many kinds of software to either help them in a middle of the game by telling them the odds and outs they have or to analyze their own or their opponents playing habits. I'm going to go through some of the most used software around and look at some of their good and bad sides.

Poker Tracker

The single most used program used by players online is Poker Tracker, and not without a reason. Poker Tracker is a complicated program that gathers lots of information from handhistories and presents them in a way that it's quite easy for a person to see what's going on with his or others game. When you start using Poker Tracker you might be baffled about all the information available and how to use it in most effective way. Importing hands to PT is easy on some sites, a bit complicated on others, but as it's different for each site it's not practical to go through it in an article like this, but you should manage fine by reading the help file.

When you've imported some hands, you want to check out the ring game player statistics, and find your own nickname from the list on the left. You then should see your own stats displayed on the main screen of the program. You can find articles that go through different statistics in great detail but lets look at some of the more important stats and what they should look like.

<b>Voluntary Pot $ in the pot, vpip</b> : This stat tells how often you invest money in the pot preflop, it should be in a range between 13 and 18.

<b>Preflop raise, pfr</b> : This stat tells how often you raise or reraise preflop, good range is between 6 and 10.

<b>Went to showdown, wsd</b> : This should fall in around 30'ish, if it's way too high (35 or more) you may be calling too much on turn and river, and if it's much lower (25 or less) you might be folding in too many situations where it would be profitable to call or raise.

<b>Won $ at showdown</b> : This should be a bit over 50. If you have a number that's 60 or more it may be because you're folding too many winners on the river and sub 45 numbers start telling that you call a bit too much in the end.

You should experiment around with the program to see what kind of stats and notes you can find, and also search the net for more information as it's unpractical to write everything in this kind of an article.