Holdem Manager Review

I was away for three weeks during Christmas and New Years and didn’t take my laptop with me. Eventually, of course I succumbed to my drug and played some online poker but it wasn’t the same. I just didn’t feel like I had an edge and that was because I was playing without my Holdem Manager program. I did OK but at times, I just had no idea what to do. Fair enough, from time to time I don’t know what to do but without the software this feeling occured just way too often for my liking.

Now you may be reading this and think, ‘Ok, I don’t use any sort of program and I do just fine.’ If you are that person then that’s great but the simple truth of the matter is that you could be doing a lot better if you have Holdem Manager to aid in your decision making.

In this review I will tell you precisely why this is such a great product and the following are what I believe are the five most important features:

• Heads Up Display (Hud): Being able to see exactly what your opponent’s stats are right in front of you is amazing. The stats take some getting used to but once you do they become powerful in your decision-making. Importantly, the software comes with tutorials on how to interpret the numbers. See below a screenshot of my Hud. Can you spot the fish? Well, green numbers are fishy. the more hands you have on players the better as few hands can give misleading numbers.

• Hand review: With this feature you can quickly see your biggest winning/losing hands and a quick summary. Also, by clicking on the individual hand, you can get a play-by-play replay of the hand. The replay will tell you percentage to win when all in and pot odds percentage if you’re drawing. Was it really a bad beat?

• Graphing: Find out how your session/day/week/month/year has been when you see a graph. Maybe you tilted and lost tons in a short span of time and that’s your leak. Or it could be that you just plan ran badly and this will reflect in the all-in Expect Value (if you got it all in and were favoured then you shouldn’t be down as much and this will make you feel slightly better about your play but not your bankroll). Also, notice how much rakeback helps in the end, so make sure to sign up to a rakeback deal.

• Vs player feature: This cool feature will tell you in plain English HOW a player is according to his stats and what is normal. For example, reefrider has a very high turn bet compared to normal so he is generally over-representing his hand and if it may be a good opportunity to raise him light to see how he reacts, or call down liberally.

• Players (fish) list: Able to filter for numerous options including limits, hands, and player stats. A highly recommended filter is 500 hands for 4 to 6 players where the player has higher than 51% vpip (money voluntarily put in the pot – ie: played voluntarily more than half his hands). Look at the results I got, yummy yummy fishy – tag them all!

I just gave you a ‘taster’ of what you get with this product but there’s a LOT more information available on the Holdem Manager website including tons of screenshots and excellent FAQs. I love this product, I really do and highly recommend it. I just hope that my fishy opponents don’t get a hold of it.

Here’s a nice link to make sense of all the stats.