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
