Poker Academy is responsible for two poker educational tools that are truly must-haves for players who desire to learn as much about the game as they can.
Poker Academy Pro 2.5 and the brand-new Poker Academy Prospector combine for a strong one-two combination that gives players the most important thing they must have to become great players - information, particularly about themselves.
Poker Academy Pro
Simply the fact that Poker Academy Pro is packed with ways to figure out just about any numerical poker problem - from the chances that aces will hold up against three players to any combination of cards and flops a player could ever think of - makes it worth owning.
"The people who will benefit the most are the people who will put the most time into it," said Kurt Lange, Poker Academy's CEO. "It's really a training tool, so the more you use it, the more you improve your game."
Hold'em fans will spend hours messing around with the software's Hand Evaluator and Showdown Calculator tools, which allow users to analyze and be surprised by hand match-up probabilities preflop, post-flop, and of the turn for two to nine players. It even gives users the option to simulate a hand up to 500,000 times.
The Hand Evaluator allows users to pick any two cards, as well as the flop, and look at four different categories to understand just how strong the cards are. For example, the "strength" category instantly shows, in percentages, how likely the hand will hold up against one to nine players. This chart is even adjustable to allow users change the type of player they may be playing against, which changes their possible range of starting hands.
But most people will have purchased Poker Academy Pro for its powerful Poker School software, which allows students to take advantage of the most advanced poker artificial intelligence on the planet. The AI comes from the University of Alberta, in Canada, which has a computer department devoted to building computer programs to beat humans at games. The AI represents about 20 years of research. Through a partnership, Poker Academy is privy to all of the research information of the games department, and it even employs some of the people who have studied there.
All of this artificial intelligence is used to fill the virtual Poker Academy tables in both ring games and tournaments, both of which are fully adjustable. Poker Academy gives its users the option to swap out the randomly generated poker bots with other bots, all of which have different playing styles. The playing styles, starting-hand selection, and post-flop play can all be viewed and even edited for the bots. If a user wants to face a table of ultra-aggressive players who play nothing but ace-king and better, they can build a table like that.
On the tournament side, Poker Academy provides users with default structures of 13 tourneys, including the 2005
World Series of Poker main event, the 2005
WSOP Circuit events, the Bay 101 supersatellites, the PokerStars sixhanded multi- and single-table tournaments, and others. All of these structures can be edited, so users can easily simulate anything from the the 2007
WSOP main event structure to
Card Player's own Wednesday night home poker tourney. From there, users can also choose the kinds of bots they want to play against to further customize the tournament.
The options tool takes it even further. Players can play with all of the hands showing face-up, they can lock the button in place, play hands over and over, or just about anything else a player might want to do when analyzing his game.
Also, like the tournament games, the ring games are fully changeable. Players can adjust the amount of buy-ins for each player, the stakes of the game, the rake percentage, and the opponents' skill levels. Poker Academy provides users with many pre-built ring games to choose from, as well. In short, players are able to simulate any playing condition they want.
The software also comes with access to Poker Academy Online, which is a poker site that lets students test their games against fellow Poker Academy users in both ring games and a variety of different tournaments. The users use something called "PAX" money, which can be only earned through tourneys and by winning in the ring games. Poker Academy tries to limit the amount of PAX a player can get in order to give it a sort of value so that players don't just "donk" their play money chips away.
After the user generates a plethora of poker information by playing for hours and hours on the Poker Academy software, he can go back to the analysis tools and take a peek at his statistics. Histories of all hands that were played are collected, and a chart is provided to show which bot is winning (or losing) the most off of the user. Hand histories from many online sites can also be imported, allowing the user to look at the same kind of information in real-life games.
Poker Academy Pro truly packs so much into one program that it's hard to outline all the features it offers. Please visit
www.poker-academy.com for more information. And check back with
CardPlayer.com later this week to learn about a tool no online poker player will want to live without, Poker Academy Prospector.
