Online Poker Tracking Software

So now that I am getting into playing online, I thought it was about time I purchased one of those online tracking programs that shows you statistics on your opponents as you play. I was planning on purchasing Poker Tracker along with a compatible program that takes the Tracker information and turns it into a Heads Up Display (HUD) that overlays on top of your Full Tilt screen (or Ultimate Bet, Poker Stars, whatever.) This software keeps track of every hand that any of your opponents play while you are at a table with them. It then turns this information into statistics that show you (among other things) how many flops they see, how often they show down at the river, their win % at showdown, how often they attempt to steal blinds, how often they fold to steal attempts, etc. Of course, this is highly useful information. The problem was that since Poker Tracker accumulates and stores all of this data on your computer's hard drive (as opposed to on their servers), you have to have a reasonably proficient computer in order to run it properly. Also, my understanding is, that while you can license the software to run on up to two machines, it does not integrate the data from one machine to the other, so it is definitely in your best interest to accumulate the data and play all of your tourneys from the same machine.

This all being the case, I decided last night to go out and splurge on a new laptop. (I'm fairly certain that the one I was using was a Commodore something.) I bought a nice, new Fujitsu (they told me that these are the best brand) Life Book. I am already enjoying it immensely, and especially enjoying the part where I can play three different sites and not crash my machine.

So this morning, just as I am getting ready to buy Poker Tracker, I remember seeing on Annette Obrestad's website a mention of a tracker software called Poker Crusher. I looked it up on her blog (which by the way is excellent....annetteobrestad.blogspot.com) and it looked like it was even better than Poker Tracker. It gives basically the same statistics, but instead of accumulating them on ONLY the tables that you play on, it taps into a database of millions (supposedly) of hands that have been and are being observed and tracked regardless of whether you are online or not. Plus, Poker Crusher stores all that data on their databases instead of on your hard drive...which is great, since those data files can get really big from what I've heard. The downside is that Poker Crusher charges a monthly subscription fee (which is pretty steep) especially compared to the one time fee charged by Poker Tracker. So, needless to say, before I purchased this, I wanted to make sure the program was all it was cracked up to be.

So I downloaded the 5 day free trial version of Poker Crusher and installed it on my computer. I was super excited to see how it worked, so I immediately opened Full Tilt and sat down in a one table sit and go. Of the 10 players at the table, three had no hand history/stats what-so-ever. Of the seven remaining, only one person showed stats based on a hand history of more than 1000 hands. This seemed pretty odd to me as I know that a lot of these sit and go players grind out several SNGs every day. So I clicked on my own stats to see what's up. They had only tracked me in their database for a little over 300 tournament hands (information current through today's date according to their system.) Since I've played literally thousands of tournament hands per day for the last week and a half, that was pretty disappointing to me. It certainly seemed that they were not tracking nearly as many hands as they led people to believe. I also had some issues with usability and the HUD interface.

I have sent an email to customer service at Poker Crusher asking them to address my concerns. I let them know that if their software can do what they say it can do, then I am definitely interesting in purchasing it, but if not, it's a steep price to pay for what Poker Tracker can do equally well.

Has anyone out there used either Poker Tracker or (more specifically) Poker Crusher? I would love comments on either interface. I know that Poker Crusher is quite new, so I don't know if anyone is on there yet, but if you are, let me know what you think.

Until next time...Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night!