Review of Idle Miner
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Any serious online poker player knows the value of analyzing hand histories. A lot of poker strategy can be learnt by studying your good and bad moves afterwards without time pressure. Of course, if you could study other players’ hand histories as well, you could learn even more.
And now you can. With the Idle Miner poker software from idleminer.com at your computer you can monitor tables at selected stakes and store their hand histories even if you’re not playing at the table. Idle Miner connects to the site and automatically reads hands from all active tables that match your settings and feeds them into Poker Tracker, the eminent poker statistics software.
Superhuman observer
For example, since Idle Miner works on any blind level, you can keep track of the hottest high stakes games at Full Tilt Poker, involving players like Gus Hansen and Phil Ivey, all the while not missing out on a single hand at your own level, building a valuable hand history database that will serve you very well when you sit in an online poker game.
Idle Miner currently works with three online poker sites: Party Poker, Full Tilt Poker and Absolute Poker. More sites are bound to come, but one must realize that the program works quite closely with the site, so keeping them in phase is no small task.
Poker mining while you’re idle
Idle Miner doesn’t just save hand histories to your hard disk so you can import them into Poker Tracker; the program also keeps track of all active tables and includes any new tables in its surveillance. All this is done automatically and entirely hands off. You can even run Idle Miner in Screen Saver mode, so that it starts as soon as you’ve been idle for a couple of minutes. When you return to the computer, Idle Miner instantly shuts down.
Conclusion
So to sum things up, you can certainly improve your texas holdem poker odds a lot with this tool. Studying your own hands and those of other players, seeing what your game looks like from a statistical view point, and also noting how your game changes over time are all extremely useful lessons for a poker player who wants to learn and improve. One thing is sure: Once installed to your computer, Idle Miner won’t be out of work.
Pros:
* Easy to use
* Runs smoothly in the background
* Integrated with Poker Tracker
Cons:
* Supports only three poker sites
* Licenses for separate poker sites must be bought separately
Features: 9/10
This program delivers. All features that you would expect are there, and we didn’t notice any systematic problems. Once you get the file paths right, the programs ticks away like a clockwork on the hands being played. A great piece of software.
Usability: 9/10
Idle Miner is easy to use. It honors the Windows user interface standard all the way, which guarantees a familiar and intuitive interface that behaves the way it should.
Value: 8/10
Idle Miner is a great program if you’re interested in statistics – and capable of drawing conclusions from statistical material. Great truths wait to be discovered, if you have the patience.
Overall: 9/10
For poker players with a serious ambition to improve and the right mix of energy and intellect, this almost industrial poker data mining software is a must!
VERDICT: Get it, start it up, and stop lending computer idle time to silly computations on the human genome!
