MagicHoldem.com

There was a comment in my last post to become an affiliate for MagicHoldem.com, a Poker Odds Calculator. It is a real time Poker Odds calculator and it supports over 100 poker rooms. There is a 100 hand trial period so I downloaded it and played today so that I could evaluate it.

To be honest, I wasn't too thrilled with it. I think it is great for someone starting out as a novice playing Texas Holdem but, other than the odds calculator and showing the outs that are available it really was very helpful to me. If anything, it played a little looser than I do.

Here is how it looks when it is being used:

And here are the explanations for the different tool bars.

One hundred free hands wasn't nearly enough to evaluate this program. You only get to see about 20 hands that you actually play and most of those you fold on the flop so they are about worthless. Even Poker Tracker gives you 1000 free hands to evaluate their program and MagicHoldem.com needs to give you more free hands.

This program was just like Pokerbility that came out about two years ago. I evaluated that program and found it severly lacking. MagicHoldem is much better than Pokerbility was back then but it may have fixed some of its bugs by now so I hate to compare the two. MagicHoldem does more than Pokerbility did.

Pros and Cons about the software

There weren't too many Pros. It is nice to have the Pot Odds and Outs figured out for you. It does give you advice on whether to call, fold, raise or reraise preflop.

The cons were many. You had to have the poker room at the default size for the program to work so it limited your ability to multi-table without having overlap. It didn't even work when I launched Absolute Poker but it did work on Full Tilt and on PokerStars. On Absolute Poker it kept asking me to put the poker room at the default size before it could work and the poker room was at the default size.

There was no difference between advice for Full Ring tables or Siz max tables. It didn't change its advice depending on table position as several times I would be Under the Gun with A/rag off and it would say call or raise. It did the same when I was dealt 6/6 UTG although a raise there would be the better move.

I think this program if fine if you only do one or two tables at a time and if you are new to the game. It can be very beneficial but if you are a veteran player this will just clutter your screen.