The Best Online Poker Software to Increase Your Winnings
The online poker landscape has changed quite significantly over the years. What started as a fairly modest, niche market, turned into a global phenomenon, with millions of people from all over the world turning to poker, either as a hobby or a full-time profession. This created a highly competitive environment where maintaining your win-rate is a real challenge.
While working hard and studying your game on your own can help you get over some of the hurdles, modern-day poker, especially at the highest level, has become much more demanding. If you’re to be a winner in these games, you simply must learn to use the best poker software out there. Various poker tools have become an integral part of the game.
While many players have voiced their dissatisfaction about the direction the game has been taking, it is unlikely things are going to change. Those looking to truly make it on the internet must accept the fact that using poker tools is now simply a part of the game. To beat the competition, you’ll need to be at least as good as the rest of the player pool in using these tools to your advantage.
In this article, we’ll focus on some of the most popular, top poker software solutions and will try to briefly explain how each of them can contribute to your development as a player. While this single article won’t be enough to give you all the knowledge you need about these tools, it should give you the nudge in the right direction and help you understand what it is that you should be looking for.
Hold’em Manager 2 / Hold’em Manager 3 (Beta)
Hold’em Manager 2 is one of the longest-standing and most essential poker tools out there. This is the bread and butter of the poker software, and you can’t expect to get far without it. This is essentially a database of all the hands you’ve ever played. While playing, this best poker tracking software collects information about your opponent’s tendencies and collects them in a database – things such as how often they raise before the flop, how frequently they continuation bet, what is their 3-bet frequency, etc.
This information is visually displayed for you through the HUD (Heads Up Display) so that you can see them in real-time. Having this data available to you while playing is critical as it can help you tailor your own strategy based on the particular opponent’s playing style. Hold’em Manager has been hugely popular with the players and the company has launched the beta version of Hold’em Manager 3, with even more filters, brand new user interface, fresh HUD editor, and more.
NoteCaddy Edge
NoteCaddy Edge is a poker tool developed to work in conjunction with Hold’em Manager 2. It relies on the information contained in your HM2 database to create quick notes (definitions) for your opponents, to help you make even better decisions in various spots. The software also comes with a variety of predesigned HUDs so that you can have all the vital information on your screen without having to create a HUD yourself.
Poker Tracker 4 (PT4)
Poker Tracker 4 is essentially the same type of software like Hold’em Manager. It does exactly the same thing, gathering the information about your opponents’ play, storing them in a database, and displaying them in a clear and concise manner through an on-screen HUD. This tool is very powerful and a must-have for serious players.
Of course, you don’t need both HM2 and PT4. Since both tools do the same exact thing, you can take your pick. Hold’em Manager seems to be more popular with the players in general, but you won’t go wrong if you choose PT4, either. The choice is more down to which software you find easier to use and get used to. In general, it seems that cash players are more inclined to use PT4 while tournament grinders lean more towards HM2.
What is even more, top online poker sites also offer player-favorable rakeback, thanks to which players can maximize their profits. For those who do not know, the rake is a certain percentage that sites take from every single real-money pot. This percentage is usually small. Afterward, the rakeback is used to redistribute a part of those funds back to loyal players. For instance, with a rakeback of 10%, you receive 10% of your rake generated back on a weekly or monthly basis.
Pio Solver
If you’re completely new to online poker, Pio Solver is a piece of software that you probably don’t need at this stage of your career. This tool has been envisioned and designed by some of the best professionals to help teach you how to play the GTO game. GTO stands for the Game Theory Optimal, meaning an approach that can’t be exploited by your opponents regardless of what they do. This is easily the best poker analysis software available in the market right now.
With Pio Solver, you can really take your game to the next level and learn a lot about various preflop and post-flop spots. The software provides answers for almost any situation you can think of, but it approaches it from the GTO perspective. What this means is that it doesn’t adjust for other players’ tendencies but rather offers solutions that would be correct against any opponent in any scenario. With this style of play, you’re making it very hard for your opponents to take advantage of any of your tendencies and can develop a very strong, solid game.
PokerSnowie
PokerSnowie is a poker-playing Artificial Intelligence that can learn from its own experience to become better. This tool has been developed to help players improve their game away from the tables and help them learn how to handle various difficult spots in the best way. PokerSnowie can seriously accelerate your learning curve.
The software offers several different options. You can play against the AI and then review your play afterward to see what mistakes you made during the session. You can also import your actual hands from a variety of sites and have the software check them out for you and point out any potential leaks. Finally, there is the option to create all sorts of custom scenarios for specific spots, where you can get answers about the right play.
Flopzilla
Community card poker, i.e., games such as Hold’em and Omaha, are all about what hands you should be playing before the flop and how these hands correlate with potential runouts (flops, turns, and rivers). Flopzilla is a poker equity calculator designed to provide you with these answers away from the tables so that you could have better results when actually playing.
Flopzilla is a Hold’em calculator that lets you pick any hand or a range of hands and then gives you answers about how often that particular range will hit different types of hands on different board textures. If you’re wondering how often you’ll make a top pair, top two pairs, an open-ended straight draw, etc., Flopzilla will give you exact percentages. This is a very handy tool to improve your game and learn how to navigate different board textures based on yours and your opponent’s likely holdings.
ICMIZER
Tournament players often have to make decisions that go beyond just how many chips there are in the pot and how likely they are to win that particular pot. Due to the specific nature of tournaments, it is also important to keep up with the prize distribution and pay jumps as these can change your decisions in what would be standard spots in cash games.
This peculiarity of tournaments is best expressed through the ICM (Independent Chip Model), which explains how the chip values in a tournament change with regards to the payouts. ICMIZER is a poker tool designed to help you learn the ICM in a player-friendly and interactive way. With this tool, you can create various scenarios, assigning the number of players in a hand, their stacks, and relevant payouts. It is a great way to learn about ICM away from the tables, helping you make better decisions in those difficult spots that often come up in tournaments, especially at the final tables where pay jumps can be quite steep.
Table Ninja 2
Most serious poker players tend to play quite a few tables at the same time, optimizing their time to table ratio for the best win-rate or ROI. However, with many tables all over the screen, things can get quite messy, which can lead to expensive timeouts or misclicks in crucial spots. Every serious player out there knows just how frustrating this can be.
Table Ninja 2 offers an elegant solution to this problem. The software supports several major poker sites and allows you to nicely arrange your multiple tables and offers many great time-saving features. With Table Ninja 2, you can add more tables to your standard routine without having to compromise on the quality of your play. It is definitely one of the best poker tournament software solutions as MTT grinders tend to play quite a few tables during their big sessions.
Tilt Breaker
Tilt is definitely one of the poker player’s worst enemies. Even those with the best strategic foundations and knowledge of the game can experience huge losses simply due to succumbing to their emotions and playing on tilt. Some players are especially prone to letting their heart take over the control of their play.
If you belong to this group, Tilt Breaker might be just the tool you need. The software lets you set a variety of options such as your stop/loss limit, maximum stakes, game types, etc. Although you can bypass it if you really want to, it isn’t that easy to do, and it will definitely prevent you from making unreasonable decision at the heat of the moment. If your bankroll has a tendency to disappear on high stakes PLO table after a bad day at 50 NLHE, this might be the best poker software you’ll ever buy.
TableScan Turbo
Winning in poker isn’t just about what you know. It is also about playing against opponents that you know are weaker than you and taking advantage of the fact. This may seem like a shady notion to some, but for those who make a living playing poker, finding soft games is essential to keep their win-rate healthy and put the food on the table.
TableScan Turbo is a tool that works in conjunction with the best poker tracking software such as PT4 and HM2. It goes through your database of players and then lets you know what tables are occupied by the weaker players. The software is capable of recognizing players that have significant leaks in their game, such as limping too much before the flop and provides you with a nice, clean sheet on who these players are and what games they’re currently playing in.
Conclusion
There are many great poker tools out there and learning how to use them is really essential to your success in this day and age. While you may dislike the notion, even some of the best in the game, such as Patrik Antonius, have admitted that it is virtually impossible to win in the games where everyone is using these tools, and you’re the only one missing out.
While you may not require all of the best poker software solutions listed here at the moment, it is good to at least know about them in case you do need them. Some of these tools, especially the best poker analysis software and tracking solutions, are pretty much must-have for any player with a serious plan to succeed.
The good news is that many of these tools come with free demo versions, so you’ll be able to try them out for a limited amount of time or with limited features without having to dish out any cash. If you find they help you play better, which is very likely to happen, you can consider the purchasing options and find the best way to acquire the tools you need the most at the moment. Although it may seem a bit pricey, investing in your poker development is something you simply need to do if you want to keep up.