Tools for online playing, tournements and ring games.

What tools are generally the most succssesful people using when playing online poker? Is it home made stuff or just poker tracker or similair or do they mostly base their game on things they see and handle only in the brain, like patterns of all kinds. I have the feeling that good players don't use that much tools. They have such a feeling for sensing players so they don't need it.

Hi,
This is a tough one there are so many. i have very recently started to make a profit playing on line. (this is after about a year of playing) a little slow to some probably. But when i say profit i mean my wins have paid for books programmes buy ins and anythin else to do with poker. so after all that paid i am now finnaly makin a $ or 2. I used poker office not really to study players but so i could watch my own play using the video play back. Over that year of playing i have found it help with my BR as i had a true outlook of my wins and loses. E.g 4 losses in a Sng doesnt always = a loss if your ITM 1. although it may feel like it. this helped with my confidence of the game. I have found i have developed a feel for plays over the amount i have played not any tools i have bought.
If your gonna invest, invest in a book and somethin like tracker or office to get a true picture of your play. Outs and odds are easy to learn if you put your mind to it. But nothing but experience can tell you when it is time to fold pocket AA when a programme is screaming at you put all your money in the middle.

The combination of pokerstove + ICM calculator is excellent for checking all-ins in SNGs. Whenever I have an all-in decision that I'm not sure of, I write down the situation with the range I put my opponent on. Then later when not playing, I can go through the calcs and see if I made the right decision given my read. If you are making all-in blunders, this will catch it.

I think Poker Office and Poker Tracker are a lot better than most of the other tracking softwares. I think they're both very good softwares, but my pick is Poker Office due to it's interface / user friendliness.

Tracking softwares are very helpful even if you don't want to have a HUD running. Things like analyzing your play and keeping track of how you're doing is a pretty important thing as well.

I use PokerTracker and PAHUD plus various home brewed charts/graphs/tools for analyzing my play. I agree with what everyone above has said, esp the part about post-game analysis. Its very important to review your own play without the pressure of being in an in-game situation.

FTR itself is a pretty fair tool