The poker industry has exploded and with it has come a proliferation of different types of poker software. Like the rest of the industry, poker database programs have ballooned in popularity. The largest database companies include PokerTracker, Hold’em Manager, and Poker Office and with them have come a variety of add-ons that have improved the experiences of the users of each program. More importantly, database programs have made their customers better at the game of poker. Let’s take a look at a few of the features of these programs to discover why so many players are using them.

1. Hero Stats – In the poker software world, you’re known as the “hero.” Go ahead and give yourself a pat on the back. If you’ve never tried out any of these programs, then you’re missing out on a wealth of stats about your own play. Looking for the percent of the time that you raised pre-flop? What about the number of big blinds that you’ve won over 100 hands? What about the amount of money that you’ve lost while open-raising with K-Q in early position? How about the number of times you’ve folded when someone three bet you? It’s all available right at your fingertips when you fire up programs like PokerTracker. It’s amazing when you think about it what kind of edge these pieces of software give their users over the competition.


2. Opponent Stats – As if knowing every single thing you’d want to know about your own play wasn’t enough, poker database programs allow you to check in on exactly how your opponents are behaving. Are your opponents particularly loose? Are they tight? Will they fold if you three bet them? Are they even a winning player? Moreover, you can use what’s called a Heads-Up display to overlay these stats right on the table at a poker site like PokerStars. Some database programs only log hands that you’ve played against an opponent. Contrastingly, some allow you to access hand histories that aren’t yours (although many of these are banned on online poker sites). All of the scouting on an opponent is already done. It’s like knowing exactly what the defense is going to run in football. All of your opponents’ tendencies are right in front of your nose.


3. Teaching Tools – As you may have already guessed, many poker instructors use tools like PokerTracker, Hold’em Manager, and Poker Office to help their students learn and grow at poker. After all, the manner in which they play is laid out in database programs. All a person needs to do is go in and find holes in a player’s game and then teach how to plug them. Often, this takes an expert. In essence, poker database programs serve as a textbook to help students of the game of poker.


4. Spotting Abnormalities – When the online poker scandals occurred on Ultimate Bet and Absolute Poker, many players used PokerTracker to load hand histories in and search through the play of the suspect accounts. The online poker community could essentially create an entire catalog of hands played by any number of people, including those suspected of cheating. They could investigate the win rate by the presumed cheaters as well as how they acted with certain hands in certain positions in comparison to how the general poker community would. It’s an absolutely astonishing amount of information that can be gathered just by playing online. It helped a multi-million dollar scandal on the Tokwiro-owned sites be cut short.


5. Add-Ons – A Heads-Up Display, or HUD, is the most popular accessory to programs like PokerTracker, which uses a program called PokerACE to place critical stats next to a player’s name when you’re battling it out on the virtual felts. However, without the core database, these stats are not possible to display. The ability to use these add-ons is another reason that players purchase database programs. More on these types of poker software to come here on Poker Bonuses.