Poker is a very well-known gambling game that offers exciting moments when you’re wining and pretty bad feelings when you’re losing. Poker is not about being lucky, as many of you might think, it is about math. When the cards are dealt, every decision you make should be based on odds, probabilities and chances. If you can learn these basics, then you can really start thinking of making some money from online poker.

There are various types of Poker games: Texas Hold’em, Omaha, 5 card draw, 7 STUD, HORSE, and many more. The most popular of these is Texas Hold’em No Limit, of course. You are dealt two cards, and 5 cards are dealt on the table (community cards). There are four betting rounds: pre-flop, flop, turn, and river. The player who holds the highest hand made from five cards wins the pot.

In online poker, you can play the Texas Hold’em game in two different ways. You can either compete in the Ring Game, where you sit down at any table you want and leave whenever you want, or in the Tournaments, where you pay a buy-in, and try to take out all the other players, so you can collect the biggest prize.

The Looks

Poker Manager is a great application for your Mac OS X that provides a very simple and easy-to-use interface, where you can keep track of your poker tournaments. Poker Manager allows you to see all the information you need when you’re playing a Tournament. From the main window of the application you have access to all of its features.  

The Works

With Poker Manager you can manage two types of Tournaments: the ones where you can re-buy chips, and the ones where you can’t. The Tournament tab lets you enter basic information about the game that you’re playing, like name, buy-in, amount in chips, re-buy cost, amount in chips when you re-buy, number of rounds that you can re-buy, and commission per re-buy. All this information will help you later, when the prize pool is distributed.

In the Rounds tab, you can input the number of rounds to be played, round duration, big blind and small blind for every round, and ante. The Players tab allows you to specify all the players that have entered that tournament, and you can easily add or remove them using the “+” and “-” buttons in the upper-right part of the screen.

The Tables tab offered by Poker Manager makes it possible for you to create a random distribution of all the players. You have to specify their maximum number per table, and hit “Create a Random Seating Plan.” From the Chips tab, you can easily select the value and color of the chips on the table, while in the Statistics tab you should see the most important information about the tournament. Check if everything is correct, and then you can click on “Show the Play Screen” to start the Tournament.

The Play Screen window displays the name of the tournament, the time elapsed, the time remaining of the current round, the small blind and big blind values, and the values for the blinds in the next round. To keep up information about all the players in the tournament, just click on the Player icon on the top-left corner of the application, and you should see a list with all the tables and players. If one of them has been eliminated, simply select their name and click on Eliminate. If they have had a re-buy, select their name and click on Re-buy. This way, you will always know how much the prize pool is and how much you could earn.

Poker Manager is a great application that you can use when you have a Sunday night poker with your friends. Just type in all the information about players, rounds and tables, and Poker Manager will take care of the rest.

The Good

Poker Manager is very simple to use and can really save you time when you want to calculate things like how big the prize is, how many chips are in play, what the average stack in chips is, and the current round and blinds.

The Bad

If you want to manage a tournament that has more than 20-30 players, then it would be really a challenge to type in all of them, and it could take you a while. Poker Manager is also missing a feature that can be useful when distributing the prize pool to the winners. In my opinion, it should have a prize distribution tab, where you can specify the percent of money from the total prize that goes to the first place, the second, the third place, and so on.

The Truth

Poker Manager is a free application that you use on your Mac. It is perfect for those poker nights with your friends, and you can also play around with it to estimate calculations for bigger tournaments. You should give it a try, because there’s nothing to lose.

Here are some snapshots of the application in action: