Texas Calculatem and Poker Office Blog

Introduction

HoldEm Genius is an automatic Poker calculator, similar to Texas Calculatem, that reads cards from online Poker Rooms, calculates odds, and presents advice to the user.

It can currently be acquired free from holdemgenius.com for users who open new accounts with Pacific Poker, PokerRoom.com or Party Poker.

First Impressions

The download and installation of Holdem Genius was straightforward. Upon first running the application I got a small box, similar to that of Texas Calculatem. It also has a similar "attach" function.

However, once the application is attached to a game, it overlays the advice bar on top of the table and has a menu bar that automatically tracks the top location of the Poker table. This is very nice. As the centred advice window makes the game less frantic when multi tabling.

Heading to the "Playing Style" menu presents a set of options similar to that of Texas Calculatem. The "Option" menu, however, presents a smaller set of odds display settings. This is only a superficial ommitance and will not affect most users.

Usage Comments

For my Holdem Genius review, I sat down at two Noble Poker $0.25/$0.50 tables, playing for two hours straight. Poker Office 2 identified these tables as loose-passive, and I won $3.10 over the course of play. That equates to 1.5 BB per hour of table play. Good players can expect to make 2-3BB. So a calculator making 1.5BB on its first attempt is an excellent effort.

There is also an excellent pot odds calculation, that will advise the user to call if the pot odds suggest that calling to draw a stronger hand would be profitable. This feature is not present in some rival pieces of software.

However, despite proving its ability to beat the micro limit game, there were occasional questionable pieces of advice given. I make this judgement based on my study of the ubiquitous Bible of Low Limit Holdem - Small Stakes Holdem: Winning Big with Expert Play. As examples...

- Many experts will recommend following a pre-flop raise with an automatic bet on the flop. Holdem Genius does not do this. And can therefore be regarded as a little weak / passive.

- It's a little too weak with certain pre-flop hands. As an example, it does not recommend a re-raise pre flop with QQ.

- Some of the advice changes between the flop and turn don't seem to fit. For example... I was dealt 88 pre-flop and called as recommended. The flop came JJ7. Holdem Genius recommended a call. The next card was a 3. Holdem Genius recommended a fold. This felt strange to me. The advice felt as if Holdem Genius was drawing to a bigger hand, missed and then folded. But the only cards to improve would be the two remaining 8's. That's 26:1. And was therefore a poor call. I would have either preferred to fold (most of the time), or raise if I felt that the opponent was bluffing.

Conclusion

Despite making a few bizarrer recommendations, Holdem Genius helped me win some money and could definitely help new players improve their game. However, I'd recommend users to learn the game properly as well, as some of the advice can be a bit questionable.

Get your own free copy of Holdem Genius

If you'd like to try out your own free copy of Holdem Genius, please click here.