We've already looked at the best tools for calculating poker odds. Now let's look at some other cool tools for online poker.
Your poker site
Every online poker site has built in tools to help you with your game. They are generally very basic yet extremely useful and underused.
First of all, you can use the lobby to rank the tables in order of average pot size or players-per-flop. If a high percentage of players are playing every flop, you know there are several loose players on the table who are probably losing money.
Once you've picked the best table, it can be tough to remember how all your opponents play. This is where the notes and colour coding come in.
All sites offer a note taking function where you can jot down information after every hand. There is no excuse for not doing this as every piece of information you have, no matter how small, can be very helpful. Colour coding can also be used to quickly identify different player types.
Flop Generator
Quickly reading flops and knowing what they mean is an important skill to practice. This free Flop Generator is a great little tool for improving your flop-reading skills.
Every time you press the button it generates a random flop and displays next to it an analysis of how various hands have hit it. You can use this to think about how you would play certain hands on each flop. If you hide the analysis, you can practise determining the possible hands your opponents may have and how they connect with that flop.
Tracking Software
The most important investment you can make if you’re serious about playing winning online poker is a piece of tracking software. The two most popular programs are Poker Tracker 3 and Hold'em Manager (both come with free trials, and to-buy options from $45-$90).
This software stores every hand you play in a database. You can then analyse all this data to find out where your strengths and weaknesses are.
You can compare your data to that of other players to see where you might be going wrong. Are you playing too many hands? Are you losing too much money with your draws? Having thousands of hands at your fingertips makes it easy to answer these questions and alter your play accordingly.
The other major feature that these tools have is a heads-up display (HUD). This takes the stats that you have gathered on your opponents and overlays them onto your online poker table in real time.
The information you get from these stats allow you to see how your opponents play and how you may be able to exploit them. It’s important to say that HUDs don’t tell you what do to, they only give you the information that you have to then decipher and use to the best of your ability.
Other Tools
This article covers only a brief selection of the tools out there. If you want to improve your game even further there are many other tools you can look out for.
If you can think of an area of online poker where a piece of software could help you then that software has probably been made and a quick search should find what you’re looking for.
Next up, we're going to look at a crucial part of poker - Reading other players.
