Law School Poker - Oye, Oye, Oye! Welcome to the internet's first and only site created exclusively for poker-playing law school students and graduates.

May, 2006

Advanced Tools to Take Your Online Game to the Next Level
By the Law School Poker Editors

With the explosion of internet poker came a concomitant explosion of electronic tools and software to help online players analyze and improve their game. We review and grade a few of our favorite such programs here.

PokerTracker
$55 at www.pokertracker.com
LawSchoolPoker Rating: A+

Simply put, this is the gold-standard in 3rd-party poker software, and if you don’t have it, you’re leaving money on the table. Is it the most intuitive software in the world? Not quite, but we urge you to invest 4 or 5 hours to read through the PokerTracker tutorial and teach yourself how to navigate through the menus and statistical functions. It will all come as second-nature soon enough. The most underrated resource might be the PokerTracker bulletin board, where anyone can post a question and have it answered within hours by Pat, the software’s developer.

What does PokerTracker do? It allows you to import the hand histories (text summaries of hands you play that every online site provides free of charge) from every hand you play online, and analyze your game 6 ways to Sunday. Here is a screenshot:

All that data might look a little overwhelming at first, but a few hours of practice with Pokertracker will have you cruising through the features like a savvy veteran. You can use it to review specific hands you played that called for difficult decisions, study the tendencies of your opponents, search out and make notes to identify poor players, and those functions only scratch the surface of what the software can do. Pick up PokerTracker and learn how to use it now.

PokerAce HUD, $25
$25 at www.pokeracesoftware.com
Law School Poker Rating: A

A valuable companion to PokerTracker, PokerAce Heads-Up Display (PAHUD) displays your PokerTracker database’s statistics graphically right on your poker table. In the old days, players used to have to check their opponents’ PokerTracker statistics manually, a rather time-consuming endeavor to say the least. With PAHUD, simply open up a poker table or two, and if you have PokerTracker statistics on an opponent, they’ll show up right next to the player’s seat onscreen. Simply invaluable for getting reads on your opponents, especially when playing several tables simultaneously. Check out this following screenshot to see how statistics are helpfully overlaid on the screen. You can choose from among dozens of statistical metrics, and place them in whatever locations you like.

PokerStove
FREE!, at www.pokerstove.com
LawSchoolPoker Rating: B+

PokerStove is a nice little utility that quickly calculates the equity assigned to each player involved in a hand. It allows you to input all known information (e.g. your own hole-cards, the board cards, etc.), and in what might be our favorite feature, allows you to explicitly define a range of holdings for your opponent. For example, you might want to evaluate a situation based on the assumption that your opponent holds two random cards, but let’s say that he is a very tight, predictable opponent, who had raised pre-flop. PokerStove allows you to restrict his hand to be one of AA, KK, QQ, JJ, or AK, and evaluate the equity of your own hand against that specific range of holdings. Here is a screenshot from their site.

Poker Patterns
FREE!, at www.pokerpatterns.com
LawSchoolPoker Rating: A

Another nice little PokerTracker add-on that creates a chart of your wins and losses from your database, and features many customizable options that allow the user to restrict the stakes, date range, and display preferences. Here’s a sample chart:

See Your Opponents’ Hole cards?
We probably get more questions about these so-called “Cheat at Online Poker” products than any others. We won’t list any links to these scam-artists here, but they aren’t too hard to track down if you’re intent on doing so. In short, some unscrupulous individuals claim to sell programs that will let you see your opponents’ hole cards. Bluntly stated, these are outright lies: no such programs exist. Think about it for a second: if you had the ability to see your opponents’ hole cards, why would you sell it for $49.99 when you could simply use it yourself at the highest-stakes games and make tens of thousands of dollars a day?? Any images on these websites that appear to show an online poker table with opponent hole cards exposed are doctored, usually poorly. Like widescale phishing scams, these lowlifes are simply hoping to dupe a small enough percentage of people to squeeze out a few extra dollars. Steer clear of these swindlers.

Other useful products

Time constraints prevent us from discussing every advantageous 3rd-party program we’ve tried, but we’ll mention a few of our favorites briefly here:

MultiTableHelper v.2, free at www.multitablehelper.com

Facilitates the playing of multiple tables at once for those with single monitors or laptops

Hand Converter, free at http://www.darksun.lunarpages.com/poker/

If you enjoy posting hands on internet bulletin boards for analysis and discussion, a tidy little converter like this one comes in really handy. Simply paste the raw text from the poker site’s hand history, and the converter spits it back out in a format that will look nice online. If you don’t like the above converter, here’s another one you can try: http://www.neildewhurst.com/hand-converter

Overcards.com

The administrator of this site (he goes by “Mogobu the Fool”) is one of our favorite poker software developers. Take a few minutes to poke around the site. He has many free tools useful for the intermediate-to-advanced online poker crowd. We particularly like

iWitness – a program that automatically keeps a user-defined number of Party Poker tables open, for the purposes of datamining
PartyPlanner – a program that specifies where on-screen Party Poker should place newly-opened tables

If you want to maximize your winrate, you must – not should, but must – take the time to learn how to make use of these tools. (As of this writing, every major online site has approved their use.) If you’re serious about improving your results online, you would be foolish not to make use of these advantageous programs.

* Intellectual property rights in the articles above rest wholly with lawschoolpoker.com or the contributing author, and no portion of the works may be copied or reprinted without express written consent. (Come on, we’re lawyers. Do you think we’d forget the IP disclaimer?)