Wednesday, January 18, 2006

Helpful tools?

The following is a list of all programs that I use both in real-time and offline:
- Poker Tracker - an essential $55 data mining tool
- PokerACE HUD - a $25 real time display of data mining info
- Poker Stove - basically a free, but very fancy poker calculator
- Poker Patterns - a free graphing application for displaying your archived Poker Tracker results
- Autohotkey - a free automation/hotkey/scripting tool that I use to replace my mouse with keyboard only shortcuts when multitabling at sites ~that don't steal focus~!!!
- UltimateHistory - a free application that can be used to capture UltimateBet hands for import into Poker Tracker
- Excel - simple poker results spreadsheet

Some notable program/tools that I currently don't use are:
- Turbo Texas Hold'em , Poker Academy - poker simulators
- StatKing - a $30 tool for tracking poker results
- PokerCharts - a subscription based ($2/month, $20/year) web based tool for tracking poker results
- regular/automated data backup?? - Every few months I wake up in a cold sweat and remember to make a backup of my poker tracker data and my poker results spreadsheet. There has got to be a better way.... Maybe something really hi-tech like putting a post-it note on my monitor reminding me to do data backup biweekly.

Does anyone use any other tools/utilities for any aspect of their poker playing?

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I'm thinking of switching from using Excel to something like StatKing or PokerCharts that seem to be the premier 2 apps for tracking results.

Currently, I track all my play, both live and online, in an Excel spreadsheet. I always log the game type, stakes, result, date, and session duration. I have a seperate worksheet for each site that I play at plus a worksheet for live play. I don't have any good reason for having a seperate worksheet per site; originally I just thought it might be easier for me to reconcile the results that I tracked with my actual account balance at each site to check for mistakes (either mine or theirs)
It is a very low tech approach, but historically I prefer to look at raw data. I also generally don't mind occasionally doing some semi-manual sorts of the data to do various types of queries.

As I have increased the number of sites that I play at, types of games, and stakes, it is becoming increasingly unwieldy and inefficiently do offline data analysis of results.

The cost difference between StatKing and PokerCharts is neglible. PokerCharts seems to be more feature rich, but I'm not sure how I feel about loading my own personal information onto their site. (One of their arguments is that their site is more secure than an individual's PC connected to the internet. However, I have a seperate PC that is not connected to any network on which I keep all of my personal data)

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(edit)
TripJax's post today discussed another free alternative - Poker Dominator's session tracker

(edit 2/7/06)
Pokernerd (and many others) rave about SNG Power Tools created by eastbay.

6 comments:

d said...

Laserphish,

Thanks for the response. I did notice checkyourbets from pokerdominator's comparison chart (and also noticed that cardplayer.com offers a similar service).

I'm probably going to try out each of the online sites for a while. I still have reservations about uploading my personal data to a site, but I guess that for the free sites it is essentially anonymous where you can even register with some secondary email account.

-Dave

TripJax said...

glad you checked out my site. thanks!

i had never seen some of the stuff you listed..thanks for putting it up...

d said...

Trip,

np.

thanks for sharing the info about PokerDominator. I'm giving it a test run, as well as simultaneously at PokerCharts and CheckMyBets (the CardPlayer one seems far too basic).

Dave

CC said...

I used Poker Edge for a while (http://www.poker-edge.com), which is a paid database of all players (sort of PokerTracker on steroids). I quit the subscription more because I reacted to the data a bit too much, but that shouldn't be any real problem. Thanks for all of your stuff as well.

d said...

Was poker-edge one of those tools that was banned from being used with some of the online poker sites?

Maybe I'm thinking of poker-prophecy...

Never-Limp said...

Poker Edge is banned, but some people use it anyway.