How do you learn to play poker? Read a lot of books, get advice, watch the good players and learn, and play a lot of hands. The last one should be on top of the list as nothing beats experience. Chess players become world champions by learning from the best but also from playing thousands upon thousands of games. It should not be any different in poker. Like an athlete, the more training you get the better you are overall.
But as you get serious with poker, how do you know if you are improving? How do you keep track of your winnings? How do you study the hands that you play to find faults in your game that you have to correct?
That is where I think the value of poker trackers come in. There are plenty of trackers down there, be it free, one time pay, or subscription based. If you’re a newbie and want to be able to analyze your game, analyze the game of your opponents and generally get a better picture of who you are up against and how you stack up, SnG and MTT trackers are great, and so are HUDs.
Tracking software is extremely useful for keeping track of all kinds of results in your games. You can find out a lot about your own play and your opponents' play. You can learn if you are a long term winning player at 5-10 NLHE to how much does player x defend against steals.
You can save your best hands, and your worst beatdowns and even get all your data sorted per hand, per hundred hands, and per thousand hands to see the trends in your game and then adjust if need be. I think with trackers now it’s a lot easier than it was ten years ago to get better at a quicker pace because you have all this information in front of you, ready to be analyzed and broken down.
For poker rankings, try TopShark, OPR and SharkScope. The first two are free, while the latter has a monthly fee. You should also take a look at Poker Tracker and Holdem Manager with Tournament Updater add-on for summaries. There’s also Poker Tracker 3.
HUDs are also very handy when doing MTT as they give you an overview of your opponents and you get to search for their history and tendencies online, but the best tool for tournament strategy is Tournament Indicator which is specifically designed for profiling in tournaments – which can be drastically different then ring games. I find that every little advantage helps. Overall, as a tool, it does not help you win games, but it helps you win games, so indirectly trackers and HUDs make your game better in the end.
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