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Review of the Poker Tournament Manager - Poker Clock & Tournament Software
| | Reviewed 30th March 2006
This is the THF review of Poker Tournament Manager - a Poker Clock & Tournament program (click here to visit their website). The copy we reviewed was the deluxe edition. You can comment on this review here.
Poker Tournament Manager is a program which manages your blinds and tournament structure. The idea is to have your pc or laptop sitting near your game with the software on so that everyone can see when the blinds go up etc. You can download the standard version from the Poker Tournament Manager Website for $49.95. The deluxe version is slightly more expensive at $79.95 however this version tracks much more stats over time so can tell you who is the best, worst overall as well as helping out a little more with merging tables. Both versions can be downloaded from the website after purchase though for an additional $5 you can get the software sent to your home address in CD ROM format.
The program installs very quickly - just your standard windows program installtion, so now worries there! When you open up the software for the first time you will see the main option screen with 4 different areas.
- Tournament Manager
- Manage Leagues Tournaments & Players
- Web Results Posting
- Stats Tracker
First of all you need to name your league. So for example, for your sunday games with your buddies you could call it 'The Sunday Game' but for the thursday night games with your dad and his friends you could call it 'Dads League'.
Tournament Manager
So you've named your league. Now you need to setup how your running your tournament. Just like you have the option to have unlimited leagues, you can also set up numerous type of tournaments. Again, this is a pretty handy feature when you think about it. Obviously you want to take the time to tweak the tournament setup the way you want it but after you have done so you really dont have to touch it again unless you want something changed. So you could set up a heads up tournament, turbo tournament, freeze out etc.
The tournament wizard is pretty self explanatory. There are 6 options/pages to go through - all of which have default settings in them already, which will help players who are just learning how to play holdem tournaments.
- Basics - This is the page where you name your type of tournament, when its on and how many players per table you want.
- Buying In - You specify your chip levels on this page. You also have the option of giving players a rebuy or add on. The right panel asks for the estimated number of players, buyins and addons and then estimates how much money will be in the pot.
- Chips - Poker Tournament Manager then asks you to select how much each ship is worth and what colour that chip is. It then asks how the starting chips will be divided amongst members at the start of the game.
Click on any of these images to see the full sized image on a new page
Basics
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Buying In
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Chips
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Levels
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Payouts
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Advanced
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- Levels - The level section will be a godsend for people who never know how to set the blinds!!! PTM asks how many breaks you want and how long you want the game to last and it calculates the rest. You can let the software do everything or you can manually change the blinds yourself during the game.
- Payouts - This is where you set how many players get paid and by how much. You can also add additional payments or put bounties on specific players heads.
- Advanced - Some of the advanced options include adding the game rules and speficying upcoming tournaments and advertisements. This would clearly be helpful to pubs etc that run games.
After you have done this software gives you a tournament check list which can be printed and kept for reference. Click here for an example of a tournament checklist.
And thats it. You start the clock, a big horn sounds and your tournament is on the way. In the background screen the message will rotate between the rules, the levels and any advertisement you may have. You can still change settings during the game if you want.
Click on any of these images to see the full sized image on a new page
Manage Leagues Tournaments & Players
This is the area you add players to the league and modify your exisiting league and tournament settings. Not much else here really!
Web Results Posting
This is a free add on service provided by Poker Tournament Manager. Basically, after your tournament has finished you can post the results on your own website of Poker Tournament Manager. You can add everyones email to the setup so that once you post them they'll get an email telling them the results are on the web.
Stats Tracker
The stats tracker lists all of the players in a given league. It shows their average finish and shows the number of 1st place, 2nd place (and so on...)...finishes they have acheived
Conclusion
Unfortunately, i dont have another home game for a few weeks so i couldnt test the software out in a live environment. Im gonna take my laptop to the next home game and see how it goes. I have messed around with it for the last hour or so and im pretty impressed with it. Its very easy to set up and pretty quick too but you can also tweak the setup to suit you and your game.
If you only play a home game every now and then and with different people everytime then you probably wouldn't get your moneys worth with this. However, if you play every week or two weeks with the same group of people Poker Tournament Manager would be a godsend. I now play at a local poker event every sunday but before that myself and 7 or 8 friends played every sunday night for about a year. This would have made the games run more smoothly and no doubt the stats being tracked would have made things more competitive.
All in all, ive been pretty impressed with it and id reccomend it to any people out there who play in a home game on a weekly basis. Just make sure everyone chips in for it!!!
You can download the standard version of PTM for $49.95 from their official website.
* This article was written by Kevin Muldoon (aka fonzerelli_79) of TexasHoldemForums. This article may not be reproduced without our consent.
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