A Couple of Cool App's

I was sitting around bored in an airport with Wifi recently, and was looking at interesting App’s for the iphone or itouch, and I found 2 poker App’s that are worth talking about. First is Poker Cruncher, which initially appears to be a straightforward holdem odds calculator, but has an advanced version, which is much more. It calculates not only win/loss/tie stats, but can also look at other players hand ranges and calculate equity based on those ranges. I have been playing around with it for a few weeks now and really like it. Interestingly enough I have won a few prop bets at the table when some make a claim like “ I was the favorite in that hand” and you can real time calculate the exact odds and prove or disprove a claim. I am really pretty good at calculating outs and odds in a hand, and my methodology in a hand is to put a player on a range of hands and based on my knowledge of them and by carefully analyzing the situation I narrow that range of hands and calculate my equity in the hand. This App is simply an excellent tool to help hone your knowledge and sharpen your skill set.

The second App by the same designer, ICM Cruncher, which has just been released, includes an ICM (independent chip model) calculator, a final table chop dealmaker, and a push/call/fold ICM decision analyzer. For those of you not familiar with the use of ICM, you should be. Anyway, the chop deal helps calculate a fair split of a prize pool based on chip stack size. It does not have a way to modify it for the skills of your opponent. The ICM decision analyzer is truly interesting. I need a little more time to keep playing with it, but generally it seems pretty cool. Now I’m not sure if you could pick it up and use it at the table during the hand, but you could check your play after the hand or help analyze your impending situation between hands.

If you have an iphone or itouch I highly recommend these App’s. Using these two tools can and will increase your poker IQ and should therefore improve your results. If you use them I would appreciate some feedback. I have thought of a few ideas for some new App’s both poker and otherwise, maybe that will be my next project.