Poker Tools - Maximising The Odds

Becoming a crusher does not happen overnight. Along with understanding poker, the new-gen poker players are making full use of tech & tools to maximise their odds. We caught up with two such poker pros to understand their go to poker tools.

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Tpoker in more ways than we know. With the online growth of the game, people have developed tech that can ease and make the game more lucrative and simple for players. Players use this to their advantage and have made technology their best friend. Becoming a poker pro or a crusher does not happen overnight. None of them have a magic wand that will suddenly turn you into a fierce poker pro. Experience and how much of an effort you put in to understand the nuances makes the play a lot smoother, better, and more profitable.

If you plan to make poker your business, then you shouldn’t start with ‘playing’ poker but ‘understanding’ poker. Apart from understanding the nuances of position, bankroll management, and table selection, players nowadays are making full use of technology to understand more about their opponents in whatever ways possible. Every move they make, every hand they simulate, maximises their odds. Using essential poker tools, tracker software, hand simulations, and learning math redefines how you play and understand poker.

One, however, needs to understand which technology is most helpful for them and how effectively they can incorporate it into their game. Poker pro players use Heads Up Display’s (HUDs), solvers, equity calculators, and poker trackers to their advantage.

To get a better understanding of how some of this specific software is being used, Gutshot got in touch with professional poker crushers – Siddharth Barot, a killer high stakes poker player as well as previous Adda52 millions winner and Sagar Patnaik, primarily a high stakes cash grinder and tournament player as well.

To understand the extent to which these crushers use technology in their game, we questioned how they are making use of these softwares and to what extent these technologies determine a poker player’s merits.

Multiple poker software help you understand the game of poker better. If used correctly these software help fix leaks in your poker game. For example, a HUD can help you understand where you are losing/winning the most. After every session, you can check which positions you were winning/losing. This enables

By Ananya Agarwalla

you to understand if you want to change your game to play tight or loose. Equilab is another poker software where you can run range vs. range analysis and find the equity of different hands against the presumed opponent’s range. This can help you understand what ranges to call against other people with different 3bet stats and help you improve your win rate”.

A few are their go-to guides out of all the software, helping them the most in crushing the game. “I will have to say that H2N has helped me the most,” says Barot. H2N has a positional HUD function which helps us understand what opponents are doing in different spots. For example, an opponent has a 12% overall 3bet stat, which means he plays quite aggressively on a 6max table. But when we open UTG and he 3bets us from BB than this overall 12%, 3bet stat will not be accurate because he has more incentive to call rather than 3bet. Positional H2N HUD will show what his actual 3% percentage is in this spot, which will allow us to call and play accordingly.

Visual software help understand things in a better way. Patnaik uses solvers in his game. He says, “I do use a bit of PioSolver to understand mechanics behind range interactions, how range compositions lead to different strategy outputs, etc. It’s also a very visual software, so it does help understand things in a better way”.

For MTTs, people work more around ICMIZER/HRC. For cash game players, it’s PIOSolver, Simple Postflop, etc. Other software to track your hands and frequencies like PT4 and HM3 is a must. They also display HUD on tables while playing. A HUD is a must to understand your opponent better. It helps adjust specific spots where you might have to deviate from what you have studied to be the best line from a solver output.

One of the common tools used by players who are just starting out and equally by professionals is odds and equity calculators for determining the odds of winning they have in any given hand.

Solvers simplify your game to heuristics (if used and interpreted in the right ways). As mentioned earlier, solvers help you visualise how the game tree makes equity value better. They can also be used to craft specific strategies based on opponent types. Irrespective of whichever games you play, a little bit of solver help when learning the game off the table goes long.

HUDs are very much an essential part of a poker player’s life. If you are looking to make a living through poker, then you must have a HUD. Otherwise, no matter how exceptionally talented you are at poker, other people, who religiously make use of HUD, will crack your game while you keep playing the same game.

However, the bad news is most poker rooms in India do not support mainstream HUDs. In short, there isn’t a single poker tracker which works on all major poker rooms in India. As mentioned earlier, a HUD helps you understand your opponent better. In my opinion, says Patnaik, “it’s probably a priority over using solvers. HUDs have been around long before the solver era. They have been one of the earliest software’s accessible for the industry.”

To conclude, in a world that is changing at every turn because of new inventions, adapting your game and incorporating technology has become more critical than ever for poker players. Your earning is another person’s loss, and so you need to be better than the person sitting next to you at the table. Technology can help improve your game, make winning more effective and efficient, and reduce tilt as you have stats backing you up, which may help you become less emotional in the decision-making process and post that. Both Siddharth Barot and Sagar Patnaik have seen the advantages of using software and technolgy and used it to their benefit. With online poker becoming more challenging by the day and more players using different weapons to win, skills may not simply be enough to keep winning; changing with the tech world is imperative as well.