Review of Table Scan Turbo
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If you know the fish in your local live card room, finding them is easy enough – just take a look around the room. Online, it’s a trickier task to find the best opponents (and therefore, the best tables) due to the sheer volume of tables and the turnover rates of your typical online room. One tool designed to aid you in that pursuit – TableScan Turbo.
Overview
TableScan Turbo (TST) is a utility that scans the lobby of major poker room clients (clients must be open on your machine for TST to scan). You set some filters for TST regarding type of game, limit, and the like and TST returns a list of the available tables that match your specifications. TST also connects to your local HH database (PT or HEM) and integrates your stats on players currently sitting at those tables to give you a tidy, sortable picture of your current options for play at that room (or those rooms).
At the time of this review, TST was in beta and was therefore free. Check their website for current price details.
Look
There’s a lot of data spit out by this program, so a simple interface with clean lines and minimal use of color was the best way to go, and that’s what TST did. All of the data is easily readable, sorts intuitively, and is color-coded (colors and coding customizable), making it even easier for you to see what you’re looking for with minimal effort – a key feature when multi-tabling. Here’s the main screen:
Unique pros / cons
A program like this needs to be fast and easy to use. TST succeeds on both counts. A scan of the FTP poker lobby with the following filters: .50/1 PL 6 max, .25/.50 6 max NL – took under 30 seconds. Setting up the filters you want is simple; adding and removing them is also a snap.
Searches are easily customizable – a series of check boxes allows you to set what sites you want to scan and what filters you want to employ. You can also set the program to autoscan at an interval you provide, or you can trigger scans manually.
One of the nice features of TST is how it integrates pretty cleanly with your local database (HEM was used for this review). By drawing on that database, TST provides you access to another level of data regarding not only the stats of players at, but also a quick access point to additional information about those players – without cluttering up the interface, Right-clicking on a player name brings up the following sub-window:
… which can be a useful selection tool, or just a quick preview of the player before your HUD comes up.
Once TST has helped you find a table you’d like to join (you also get data on the number of players seated and current wait list), just click on that table in TST and the program will open the table for you. You can also join the waiting list for the table by right-clicking on it.
Drawbacks: I really like this program, but it’s really not that useful if you don’t have a HH database installed locally. Without Holdem Manager or PT, you’re just not going to get a ton of help game-selecting from this tool. It’s still helpful if you’re wanting to survey all the games available at a certain limit across multiple sites, but the lack of player data you’ll suffer without HEM or PT really limits the utility of this tool.
The natural integration of HEM / PT and this sort of tool isn’t lost on those companies – HEM recently introduced a table scanner and PT markets a similar add on. Right now TST beats both on cost (and is competitive on features and ease of use), but may be fighting an uphill battle long-run.
Bottom Line
TST is a good idea packaged cleanly and supremely executed. If you are frustrated with manual game selection – especially if you use HEM or PT – this tool is a no brainer.
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