Poker Applications for Your iPhone

Jacob Perez : July 13th, 2009

Anyone at the WSOP this year has no doubt noticed that the iPhone has become a near-ubiquitous accessory for poker players of all shapes, sizes, ages and skill levels. While the majority of applications for the iPhone focus on allowing you to actually play poker (versus real or simulated opponents), there’s a growing cottage industry focused on providing tools to poker players looking to use their iPhone to improve their game, manage their home tournaments, and the like. We’ve gathered up a few of the best of these tools, with a summary and pricing for each below.

Poker Timer Dealer Button
While some home tournaments can be easily run with a clock and a piece of paper, there’s also something to be said for just setting a tournament manager in motion at the start of the tournament and not worrying about much other than playing poker for the duration. Poker Timer Dealer Button ($2.99) includes the ability to customize blind levels, has support for rebuy tournaments, and provides everything else you’d expect (players remaining, average stack, level preview, etc) from tournament management software.

Free Alternative: Tim’s Tourney Timer – Lite Poker Time

Poker Deal Maker ICM
When a tournament gets down to a few players, especially a home or small tournament, the inclination is to just chop it up and start another one (or make the long drive home in the already wee hours of the morning). However, the proper math behind tournament deals isn’t always clear, and no one wants to feel like they’re getting the short end of the stick. Poker Deal Maker ICM ($1.99) offers an excellent solution to the problem of deals stalled by disagreements and competing methods of chopping – it applies Independent Chip Model math to the remaining stacks in play and offers a suggestion for splitting as the output. It also allows for manual manipulation of the output (say one player holds out for more and you need to recalculate) along with the ability to ’save’ deals so you can easily return to a proposed deal if minds change after a few hands.

Free Alternative: Pen, paper and time.

Poker Journal
Everyone’s a winning player until they start tracking their results. Keep yourself honest (and improve your game selection while you’re at it) with Poker Journal, a top-notch tracking program for your iPhone. At $12.99, the price is steep for an iPhone app, but the long list of features provided explains why the app has earned a 4.5 star average in the iTunes store despite the hefty cost. You can easily draft entries, customize by location, time, type of game, limits and just about any metric you can imagine, view the data by whatever filter you like, explore charts and graphs expressing your results and easily export all of the data to boot. Other versions cost less, but we’ve yet to find one with the functionality and ease of use offered by this product.

Free Alternative: Poker Income Lite

Poker Pocket Knife
We wanted to list at least one poker odds calculator, and the PPK is the clear choice. The folks at High Stakes Technology make a variety of iPhone apps for poker, and the PPK represents a ’suite’ of their most popular tools. Included: the standalone HST odds calculator, which is the cleanest and most comprehensive odds calculator we’ve used, a percent to odds calculator, a pot odds calculator and more. If you’re just getting a handle on the basic math of poker, this will prove to be an excellent tool to sharpen the knowledge you have while supplementing that which you lack.

Free alternative: ePoker Helper Lite

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