Serious Texas Holdem online playing needs a rather serious preparation. And isn’t only theoretical. You will have to use your computer to the maximum.

You will need the data bases of hands history, few poker calculators, programs that enable to quickly open and locate poker tables on the screen. As well as a number of minor utilities those facilitate the life of the poker player.

If you start buying all these programs you may go bankrupt even before you start playing poker. That is why I suggest to mainly using free soft. Probably only PokerTracker and Poker Ace HUD are worth paying for. And add the soft for analyzing SNG to that list.

And now directly to free soft:

PokerStove

Must Have! Everybody who calls himself player in Texas Holdem must have that soft. This is a calculator that enables you to analyze your hand: how strong it is, if the matter comes to shutdown.

AutoHotKey Poker Scripts

AutoHotKey in itself is not a poker soft. But the specialists made quite a large number of different scripts that facilitate the life manifold. Examples of such scripts are FullTiltPlanner that enable to easily play poker at many tables in Full Tilt. Or StarsSNGOpener will not let you miss a single SNG tournament in PokerStars. Or such an opus as: PotOddsHUD HUD that displays the pot size and pot odds on PartyPoker, Prima and iPoker.

EV Analyzer for 9/10-Player Sit'n'Go tournaments

If you are permanently playing SNG tournaments on PokerStars, you can't do without this soft. It hurriedly calculates your chances as per model ICM. But it supports only one tournament. It is not that much. But the author started to work on a new version that supports many tournaments. Look forward to it.

ICM Offline Calculator

Don't play PokerStars? That is why I pretty often use that simple calculator to analyze the played hands.

Universal Replayer

I prefer to keep the hands history in PokerTraker. But this soft is not free. If you don't play poker very often or you don't have enough money to buy it, I advise you to peer at Universal Replayer. This soft may become an ideal solution for you.