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fast_money
03-16-2005, 12:58 PM
I want to buy tracking SW to monitor my play.

I am looking for feedback from anyone that has tried both PokerOffice AND PokerTracker. I play on sites supported by both applications.

Which do you feel is better and why? Would you recommend I buy one of these two or is their something better out there that I'm not aware of.


Thanks in advance for your help

Dariel86
03-16-2005, 01:29 PM
I have them both and I suggest you buy Poker Tracker. The only good part with Office is the live support, for example if you don't want to count pot odds manually.


- Dariel

Peter-23
03-17-2005, 04:58 PM
Pokeroffice
In my opinion PO has a more modern look than PT. It also has a live tracker that can hold much more information during play than PT. For example you get the outs and related odds plus pot odds. But it’s not a realy an odds calculator, it only displays mandatory info so it's only good as a guideline.

It also has graphs for many of the stats witch PT does not.

The biggest downside is performance, if you have 10k+ hands in the database it starts to get annoyingly slow, even if you use MySQL. If you are serious enough to consider purchase stat SW then 10k hands is a blip. It works but I think it’s ridiculous for this kind of software.

Another issue is that some of the stats are obviously wrong. For example in the live tracker the rank does not exclude you’re HC, so you can be beaten by AhKh when you hold AhQh. Also it does not always detect the outs correct, you can have an open ended str8 draw or a double gut and it sometimes claim you have only four outs to a str8.

It’s a bit too many bugs for my liking but I think PO has a future. The bugs will of cause be corrected in future releases. The big issue I think will be performance. The PO team doesn’t seem to understand that switching to MySQL is not enough.


Pokertracker
It has a boring look and feel. Possibly because it has been around for a while and I suppose it’s not all that easy to just change. Some of the tables are embarrassingly small!

Apart for the lack of some odds in their GT (PT:s “live tracker”) and graphs PT is much more mature software almost perfect for analyzing your game. It gives you much better control over most parts of your game. It also has a replay feature which you easily can reach from most tables. Also you can export hands to excel or a text file for analyze outside PT. PT also has printing capabilities.

In my opinion PT has much better analyzing capabilities than PO.

Performance is ok.


PO vs PT
In my opinion if you want to track hands it's for analyzing your game. Modern look and small tables is secondary (the tables are not invisible). Capabilities and performance is important.

The GT is quite ok and if you want an odds calculator look elsewhere, the PO live tracker is a good idea but not at the expense of analyzing capabilities.

So the choice is easy.

I recommend PT.

pro20050
03-17-2005, 06:11 PM
If you find PokerOffice slow it´s because you need to turn off the automatic rating of your own player. I have 45 000 hands in my PO-MySQL database and multi table with no problem.

Peter-23
03-18-2005, 03:08 AM
I disagree.
To turn off rating is only good for the live tracker.

I have about 25k hands and it takes almost a minute to start the software and about half a minute to fill any tab for the first time or when I want to update with new data or other conditions.

PT is smarter, it takes time to update new data there too but when it’s done I can change tab with minor delay. It remember the last setting so if there is no new data its fast. I can use a smaller sample size, last moth or week or so, witch often is of more interest anyway. When I start PT it will then go faster. With PO I have to load the entire database on startup I have no choice.

Also when I want to use different date filters PT effect all tabs. With PO I have to update each tab separately!!!

I don’t think its MySQL database that is slow. But if the PO team were to allow player defined date filter on startup it would greatly improve performance. Another suggestion would be to not fill the detail table for the level of play automatically. I try to climb the levels so for it to automatically load the older level is just a waist of time. Let me set what level that should be loaded so I don’t have to load details twice.

This is just a couple of examples, PO is just not thought through in this regard.

I use athlon 1800 with 512 ram, no monster but it should be enough.

pro20050
03-18-2005, 09:21 AM
Strange, I have no troubles with load time. Which MySQL server do you use? I changed to 4.1 and noticed that it was a lot faster than 4.0. [ QUOTE ]
PT is smarter, it takes time to update new data there too but when it’s done I can change tab with minor delay.

[/ QUOTE ]
My PokerOffice works the same way, once I have loaded a tab with data and go back there is no new data to load and the tab appears instantly.

Peter-23
03-18-2005, 10:46 AM
That is strange.

I use MySQL 4.1.

I have delay for every tab and since the default always load the lowest level of play and I dont play there anymore I have to fill the tabs twice.

To me this is a clear (and common) progamming misstake. Performance is not only the speed of a database. How data is displayed is also important. For a user that is!

To be forced to load the tabs twice just because I have climbed a couple of levels is not very smart.

Perhaps I need a stronger computer.

pro20050
03-18-2005, 02:01 PM
You don't have to load the data everytime you start up pokeroffice, you can specify this from the settings. If you untick the boxes that says "Load all ring game data on startup" and "Load all tournament data on startup" it starts up without any load from the database at all.

Peter-23
03-18-2005, 06:20 PM
Thanks,

That shorten start up time and I can choose time period before I load details from the database, that’s much better.

It only works in the first tab though and I still have to do it twice in some of the tabs. But thanks anyway.

Remember I don’t think PO is bad, I use it, mainly because of the live tracker but I still consider PT better overall. Still I think performance is better in PT but also because of the features that is missing in PO, the replay, export, print and filtering options.

In my OPINION the purpose of this kind of software is to analyze your game so you can improve your play. PO mainly displays data when PT has features to analyze in depth.

For example, if I think I have problems with small pairs I can filter them out and easily replay the hands to see how I have played them in detail i.e. calculate precise odds and reference literature and posts on this site. Possibly that will help me to figure out how I could change my game so they make profit in the future.

This can easily be done for any set of starting hands but also blind steal, multi way play, check raise and more. With help form books and this forum PT is an excellent tool to find systematic errors in your game so you can correct them and improve. For example if I read something that I am not sure I do very well, say value betting on the river, I filter out all hands I have played till showdown for some period and see how I have played them. I might find a systematic error witch often is very profitable to correct.

This is what the important part of this kind of software is in my opinion. Performance is an important part of this since I need to populate data many times but PO also lacks many features to aid me in this work.

It’s possible to analyze in PO as well but only at an “OK” level (in my opinion). To make further improvements in this regard the PO team need to come over the performance issue since added features like this wont work well without it. But I believe their present priority is to develop live tracker and add new supported sites. This is of cause fine it’s their choice, and not really strange. They need to stay ahead with their USP and broaden their market as any company would have to so I don’t really complain, I only compare.


The initial poster to this thread asked for advice and reasons why. PT is my advice and I have tried to explain my views on why. There is no law that says they are right I only say they are mine.

If you have other criteria for this kind of software than what I have then the priorities and reasons why to buy would be different and of cause perfectly ok.

pro20050
03-19-2005, 06:36 AM
Peter, I do not argue that PT isn't better for analysis, it is. I merely found it strange that you had a performance problem with PO-MySQL since it works very well for me, and wanted to share on that subject. In terms of comparing the two these are my thoughts. For analysis PT is way better. What speaks for PO is that it has a more advanced tracking system, it actually tracks the entire game state in real time - that is a very powerful tool.

Think about it, PO could actually match the current game parameters against the database and display the data for a specific situation (in the current hand). Also, according to PO:s website they will release a GT+ like feature with the next version that will also display the betting actions on the table. I for sure would welcome that feature A LOT. With that said, I still belive that PT is a GREAT analysis tool and I would never give it up. I use pokeroffice during games (for trnys), to datamine PokerStars, and for the great graphing features, and PT for everything else.