If you are searching on the internet for poker tools to assist your poker game and skills, you will see millions of hits offering the latest innovative software to help improve your play, simple poker stats, hand analysis and so much more.

If you are willing to pay good money for this software, there are plenty to choose from but of course how will you know how good it is if you haven't tried it?

Most providers will give you a free trial, which generally lasts for 30 days. You are unlikely to be given complete access to all the features of the software but you will certainly be able to use it and learn from it.

Some offer features such as live stats, odds and outs, percentages and so on. One particular software provides heat maps showing the hands you won with and the losing hands along with tournament reports, hand replayers, mobile software and multiple graphs.

The problem is that you cannot download all the free trials as the chances are they might clash with one another. I recommend looking at all the available features and perhaps try a select few before purchasing.

The question I need to ask though - is it wise to get a Poker Helper to improve your game? What will you do if you decide to play live tournaments or you win a seat to a live tournament? You won't be able to use your software then and you could well find yourself floundering in live events.

There are two sides to this argument. Without a poker software to help you online, you might not learn as much as you could without it which in turn will assist you if you do decide to go the "live" tournament route. On the other hand, if you are lazy and rely completely on the software without learning from it, you are likely to fail if you go the live route.

It is therefore recommended that if you do decide to buy a poker software helper, make sure you learn from it. Don't be complacent and just look at the graphs and stats without changing your game to improve all the time. After all, you could well be spending a lot of money to buy the best software out there and you will need to profit from your game to cover that outlay.

In my own experience, I downloaded a free trial and only used that for about 3 months. After that, I didn't bother to load it because it stopped helping me. That said, it wasn't a great software and provided little information to assist in my game. Had it been a software I had paid for, I likely would have expected firstly a lot more information and secondly more helpful information rather than just odds and outs and percentages.

Choose your poker tools with care and make sure you benefit from them not just in your game but in your confidence during your poker games.
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