Top 5 Best Poker Tools and Poker Software for 2024
November 12, 2024 Jon Pill Contributor Yori Epskamp Senior Content Manager
If you're looking for the right poker tools to help you at the online poker tables, look no further! Poker tools and software serve several purposes like helping you track your results, improve your game, and increase your profitability at the table.
There are plenty of different ways that poker software can help your poker career. Poker trackers allow you to accurately assess your performance and analyze hand histories. Solvers can guide your overall poker strategy, provide a rough sense of the GTO play in a given spot or group of spots, and help you account for ICM (Independent Chip Model).
Tools such as a poker odds calculator can give you a quick equity check and heads-up displays help you parse the patterns of your online opponents.
In this article, we'll walk you through the types of poker software available, what poker tools can do for you, and when and how to use them.
Top 5 Best Poker Tools & Software for 2024
These five tools are some of the best-loved, most useful, and well-established poker tools on the market today. They range in cost and complexity, but every one of them has proven its usefulness in the poker software market.
PokerNews Poker Odds Calculator
The PokerNews Poker Odds Calculator is a simple, easy to use tool for checking hand v. hand equity.
What is the PokerNews Poker Odds Calculator?
The PokerNews Poker Odds Calculator allows you to calculate the equity of one set of hole cards against another.
With this tool, you can enter your hole cards along with the hole cards of up to nine opponents. The PokerNews Poker Odds Calculator will tell you the percentage chance of each hand winning at the showdown given a particular board.
How to use the PokerNews Poker Odds Calculator?
To use the PokerNews Poker Odds Calculator, just navigate to the PokerNews Poker Odds Calculator page.
Select the hand of the player you want to enter and use the card table on the right to select the value and suit of each card. Do the same for all the other players in the hand. If you want to calculate flop or turn equity, then it's just a matter of adding in the board using the same card table.
The PokerNews Poker Odds Calculator player will then give you the percentage chance of each hand winning beneath the relevant player's name. The box at the bottom will also give you a simple readout of your hand's equity against the other hands you entered.
How Much is the PokerNews Poker Odds Calculator?
The PokerNews Poker Odds Calculator is completely free to use! It costs absolutely nothing and is on the house from us. All you need is an internet connection and a device with a web browser installed.
PokerTracker 4
PokerTracker 4 is a poker tracker and heads-up display that allows you to turn your online poker hand histories into easily analyzed tables, graphs, and HUD data.
What is PokerTracker 4?
PokerTracker 4 is a piece of software that tracks your online poker hands for you and has plenty of powerful features that allow you to use that data to analyze your performance, direct your study, and get reads on your opponents in real time (at least on those sites that still allow HUDs).
How to use PokerTracker 4?
To use PokerTracker 4, download the software and use the 14-day free trial or buy a license.
Once installed, you need to link it to your online poker accounts and give it access to the hand history folders on your hard drive. Then, when you play online, PokerTracker 4 will work in the background, helping you track the hours you play, your wins, losses, and all-in EV, and the patterns of your opponent's play.
If you use it with a site that allows HUDs, PokerTracker 4 will also provide an overlay showing the statistics it has gathered on your opponents over all the sessions you have played with them.
How Much is PokerTracker 4?
PokerTracker 4 has several price points starting fromR$64.99. The cheapest version allows you to use PT4 on small stakes tables, one of either Holdem or Omaha tables. Additional price points exist for an "all stakes" version and a combined Omaha and Holdem tracker.
The top price point—which gets you all-stakes and includes both games—isR$159.99.
Buy PokerTracker 4
Holdem Manager 3
Holdem Manager 3 is PokerTracker 4's direct competitor and provides a slightly less powerful platform but with greater ease of use. HM3 tracks your sessions for you and provides the poker tools to analyze the data it collects. It can also create a heads-up display on many of the sites where HUDs are allowed.
Professional poker players have used Holdem Manager 3 for years to play at the best poker sites that allow this software. Famously, PokerStars is one of the sites that allows the usage of this excellent tool.
There is also an Omaha version of the software called Omaha Manager 3.
What is Holdem Manager 3?
Holdem Manager 3 is a poker tracking and HUD software that collects your hand histories and provides you with key statistics on your sessions.
You can also use the software away from the table to identify weak points in your game and to analyze opponents.
The HUD feature overlays data on your opponents' play in real time, but is only available on sites that have not banned heads-up displays.
How to use Holdem Manager 3?
To use Holdem Manager 3, buy a copy from the website and download the installer.
Once installed, check out the manual for a simple walkthrough to set up permissions and link HM3 with your online poker software and hand history folders.
How Much is Holdem Manager 3?
Holdem Manager 3 and Omaha Manager 3 each costR$60 for the low-stakes version orR$100 for an all-stakes version.
You can also buy Holdem Manager 3 and Omaha Manager 3 packaged together forR$100 (low-stakes only) orR$160 (all-stakes).
Buy Holdem Manager 3
ICMIZER 3
ICMIZER 3 is a piece of poker strategy software that takes a pre-flop tournament position and calculates the correct push-fold play for that spot using an independent chip model to calculate the most profitable moves.
What is ICMIZER?
The independent chip model is a way of converting the chip EV of a tournament strategy intoR$EV. ICMIZER 3 uses ICM to create a chart of a simple push-fold strategy for any tournament position you enter.
While you can use ICMIZER 3 to quickly check what the correct move was in a specific circumstance, what makes it especially powerful is that you can quickly run a bunch of similar spots with different parameters to work out how different dynamics affect your overall strategy.
Premium subscribers to ICMIZER 3 also get access to a MTT Coaching tool and a tournament replayer that can give you feedback on how you played in real spots.
How to use ICMIZER 3?
ICMIZER 3 is a browser-based online poker tool that can be used without download. To analyze a position, you can manually enter all the details of the tournament and hand, including chip stacks, number of players, and payout structure, or you can upload that information from a specific hand or tournament history.
ICMIZER 3 will then create the push-fold chart for that spot.
How Much is ICMIZER?
ICMIZER 3 allows a limited number of daily use for free. For anyone who wants full access, ICMIZER uses a subscription model.
The basic ICM calculator-only subscription costsR$80 for an annual subscription orR$15 monthly.
The 3-in-1 package with ICMIZER 3, MTT Coach, and Replayer software costsR$179.99 for an annual subscription orR$32.99 monthly.
GTO Wizard
GTO Wizard poker tool is a game theory- and solver-based training suite, that allows users to explore and study GTO strategies and analyze hands.
What is GTO Wizard?
GTO Wizard is a suite of tools designed to help you get to grips with game theory optimal play.
It uses a mix of database of positions that have been pre-solved and access to a powerful solver. Using these tools, GTO Wizard provides you with learning materials that range from simple pre-flop charts to full training suites in which you can study in-depth positions and play against a GTO opponent with instant feedback.
How to use GTO Wizard?
GTO Wizard has a large range of tools and software built into it. After signing up, players are best advised to follow the various tutorials that will allow them to get to grips with the relatively advanced tools this poker software provides.
How Much is GTO Wizard?
GTO Wizard offers a free version that includes pre-flop charts, one post-flop solution per day, and ten hands in the trainer.
You can also purchase various monthly subscriptions that are specific to the type of game you want to study. These run fromR$29 per month for a "Starter" Heads Up SNG package up toR$129 Elite packages that allow you to set parameters on the solver yourself and give you up to 150,000 hands to solve each month.
What are the Different Poker Tools/Software?
Poker tools and poker software tend to fall into one of a few major categories.
Although there are plenty of niches that poker tools fill, most poker software either serves as a poker odds calculator, a poker solver, a poker tracker, or a poker heads-up display.
Poker Odds Calculators
Poker odds calculators are relatively simple tools that will tell you the winning chances of a hand or set of hands. Good examples are th PokerNews Poker Odds Calculator and Open Poker Tools' Range v Range Equity Calculator.
What are Poker Odds Calculators?
Poker odds calculators are useful for getting a sense of how strong a given hand or range is when matched up against other hands or ranges.
In a typical odds calculator, you enter information about your hand, your opponent's hand, and the board, then the calculator tells you what the winning chances of each hand is at that point in the hand.
How to use Poker Odds Calculators
Poker odds calculators are a great tool for improving your intuition for what hands are strongest in what situations.
Odds calculators help you work out what hands play well against each other, sharpen your ability to estimate equity on the fly, and can be used to check the pot odds and expected value of a given situation.
Poker Solvers
Solvers are a group of powerful analytical tools that aim to provide good estimates of the game theory optimal strategy for a given player in a given spot.
What are Poker Solvers?
Poker solvers are a group of poker tools that are designed to generate the GTO strategy for any situation you input.
The output usually takes the form of a table explaining the best move frequency for each type of hand in your range.
Although the goal of a solver is to provide true GTO, the limits of computing power and complexity of no-limit betting mean that solver outputs are more like good estimates of the GTO strategy. Even so, these estimates are good enough to be the major force guiding strategy at the top of modern poker.
How to use Poker Solvers
Because of the limitations of both modern poker solvers and human memory, solvers are best used as tools for interrogating strategic ideas and creating general strategies.
Players who are learning the basics of GTO strategy will probably benefit more from solvers secondhand by studying pre-solved tables, like those on the GTO Wizard site.
However, more advanced players may wish to buy a solver and run their own personally tailored simulations on it.
The Top 3 Best Poker Solvers
The most popular poker solvers are PioSolver, MonkerSolver, and PokerSnowie.
PioSolver is popular with players who focus on heads-up strategy. This powerful tool allows you to calculate heads-up Nash equilibria or nodelock an opponent's strategy to figure out the best exploitative play.
MonkerSolver is a little more user-friendly and allows you to study multi-way action with built-in simplifications to improve performance.
PokerSnowie is a poker analytical tool that has built its GTO estimates using neural networks to estimate GTO in a much wider range of spots. As a result, it is faster, more flexible, and more comprehensive than most other solvers, but this comes at the cost in the accuracy of its GTO strategy estimates.
Poker Trackers
Poker trackers are tools that track and analyze your poker sessions. The best-known software like PokerTracker 4 and Holdem Manager 3 automatically record online poker sessions, but there are also other apps that allow you to track live sessions by entering the data manually.
What are Poker Trackers?
Poker trackers are tools that automatically track your online poker hands, recording your win rates, session times, and even your opponents' hands. The tracker then allows you to pore over this data in a wide range of ways including results graphs and HUD readouts.
How to use Poker Trackers
Most online poker tracking software will automatically update once you have linked them to your online poker accounts and given them permission to access your hand histories.
You can then use the software tools to produce results graphs and to look at data for specific hand types, game types, table positions, and opponents. In this way, poker tracking software allows you to get an objective sense of your performance as a poker player and to analyze patterns and weaknesses within your play and your opponents.
The Top 3 Best Poker Trackers
Holdem Manager 3 is a user-friendly online poker tracker, with plenty of functionality and an excellent range of features.
PokerTracker 4 is a powerful and thorough online poker tracker that will appeal to the more tech-savvy online player.
Poker Bankroll Tracker is the best live poker tracker on the market, allowing you to track things like session length, buy-in, and key hands. It also comes with a built-in odds calculator and is suited to both cash and tournament players.
Poker HUDs
Heads-up displays or poker HUDs overlay important information about your opponents onto your online poker tables. Once a vital part of every professional's toolset, HUDs have become less ubiquitous as many of the biggest sites have banned them.
What are Poker HUDs?
Poker HUDs are pieces of software that track the action at your online poker tables. The software then overlays key statistics for each opponent based on the data it gathers.
This information allows you to quantify key aspects of your opponent's play like what percentage of hands they play preflop and how often they raise or reraise on each street. Since the data usually comes from your own hand histories, the more you play with an opponent the better the data you have on them.
How to use Poker HUDs
Once you have set up your poker tracker and HUD to work together with your online poker software, all you have to do is open an online poker table. The HUD will appear with a string of statistics beneath each opponent's name.
The default data is usually the opponent's VPIP (voluntary put in pot, i.e. what percentage of pre-flop hands they play), PFR (pre-flop raise, i.e. percentage of preflop hand they open with a raise), and 3bet% (i.e. what percentage of preflop hands they reraise when bet to).
However, you can personalize these statistics and find many more by clicking on an opponent's entry on the HUD.
Poker professional Jonathan Little, who writes regular strategy content at PokerNews, has created a video to understand how to set up the right HUD (Heads-Up Display) to crush your opponents.
The Top 3 Best Poker HUDs
Holdem Manager 3 and PokerTracker 4 are by far the most popular and highest-quality poker HUDs on the market today. Their popularity has meant both a significant investment in constant improvements and a lot of user feedback.
Alternatively, DriveHUD is a more recent addition to the HUD market, which aims to be as intuitive and simple to use as possible. In the process is sacrifices some of the power that comes with HM3 and PT4. However, it may be worth looking at if you find the more established brands a bit intimidating.
The short answer is: yes, but only some of them, and sometimes. Tools like trackers are considered a standard tool for record-keeping in online poker and are almost universally allowed both by the terms and conditions of poker sites and by the poker world's sense of what is socially acceptable.
Heads-up displays are mostly allowed by the latter but in an effort to make the game more recreational-player friendly, most of the big sites have banned HUDs.
Solvers are allowed as training tools. However, when solvers or solver outputs are used during play, they are called real-time assistants and are considered a form of cheating.
Always check the terms and conditions of any site you join to determine if your poker software is allowed.
Is there a poker simulator? Yes. There are several useful poker simulators on the market at the moment. What is the best poker tool for PokerStars? The best poker tool for PokerStars is probably a poker tracker like Holdem Manager 3 or PokerTracker 4. What is the best online poker software? The best online poker software will depend on personal taste as well as what is legally available in your region. Check out our online poker review pages for more info. Do online poker players use software? Yes. As well as the software platform on which online poker players play, many players use poker trackers and HUDs (where allowed) while playing and solvers and training software while studying. Is there an algorithm for poker? No. While an algorithm is theoretically possible, we are a long way from working it out. Some very simple games like heads up limit holdem are close to solved, but most of the games you will actually play in your poker career are still far from it. How much do poker solvers cost? MonkerSolver costs €499 ($529) and PioSolver costsR$249 orR$549 depending on which version you buy. There are also several coaching sites that will offer you access to databases of pre solved positions, usually for a monthly or annual fee. What are the best tools to study poker? This depends on your level and the type of poker you play. Tournament players will get a lot out of ICMIZER 3 while cash game players might want to look at the software provided by sites like GTO Wizard. Can you use software for online poker? Yes. Many types of software are allowed for online poker. However, check with each site's terms and conditions as some sites ban specific tools and some software—like RTA databases or solvers—are not allowed.
Jon Pill Contributor
