Poker Stack is a new free mobile app to help you track your money and performance at the table. With its modern and slick look and feel, Poker Stack is a breath of fresh air when it comes to poker trackers and it empowers you with deep information about your games.
Our positive impression of this app is confirmed by Apple, as they’ve featured Poker Stack dozens of times in the Finance category of its App Store since it launched earlier this year.
At its core, Poker Stack is a simple app to help you track your games, and most importantly your money. But there’s a lot more to it than just that, as you’ll really be able to maximize its usefulness if you become serious about tracking your poker bankroll.
By recording your games and knowing where you’re at, it really allows you to become more confident and aware of your variances over time. It can be of great support when variance strikes. To be able to visualize how you’ve fared in the past will help you soldier on through harder times.
Poker Stack is different than other poker trackers because it’s packed with little smart details that minimize the need for data entry.
For instance, if you always play $5/10 NLHE at the Rio and you always start with the same buy-in, you won’t need to record that information over and over. Because it is location-aware, Poker Stack will detect if you are about to start a new game and ask you if you want to record it with the same settings as before.
In short, it means you can start tracking your game with just one tap on the screen and only update if you rebuy and when you cash out.
We spoke to the publisher of the app, an independent software developer, and he told us that he decided to build this app “because he thought all the other ones were too clumsy and cumbersome and he wanted an easy and quick way to record his games in order to get access to statistics about his game.”
Poker Stack is inspired by portfolio and stock market apps. On one screen you can see all your stats, your overall profit, your monthly profit, and how you did in the last game, plus you can quickly access your history.
Tapping on your last game takes you to the History screen. For the selected game, we can see the buy-ins, rebuys and cash out as well as the evolution of your stack as the game progressed (more on this later).
At the bottom of the screen sits a green chip with a + sign on it. Tapping on it takes you to the Clock screen, which you use to record every buy-in, rebuy, and cash-out.
Poker bankroll management is a must if you want to play poker seriously. There are simpler record-keeping methods out there, but according to the effort you invest will be the benefit you get from record-keeping in the first place. The goal of Poker Stack is to help poker players take bankroll management seriously by providing a simple but slick tool to make the process easy and rewarding.
There are more than 40 different animated graphs available on the app, categorized by cash games or tournaments. You will discover your win rate, monthly results, hourly profit, most profitable location, most profitable type of games (by genre or blinds), best and worst sessions, etc. All these are automatically calculated from the data you enter.
Beyond keeping your lifetime poker stats handy and accessible, this app acts as a very useful resource if you’re a poker professional lives in a country where you need to report your gambling profits/losses to the tax authorities.
The free version of the app allows you to get your total bankroll balance and your monthly profit/loss. The paid version of the app unlocks all the additional features that allow you to start to dig deeper into your statistics. You can purchase each type of graph/feature individually or subscribe to the PRO version which unlocks all the statistics for you, includes filters and offers password protection.
A one-year subscription costs $75 and comes with a free 2-month trial. If, at the end of the trial, you decide to keep the PRO version, you get a 50% discount for life ($38 per year).
Finally, as promised earlier, one of the most intriguing feature of the app is that it facilitates your ability to track your stack during a live game. You can set up a reminder (by default it is set to every 15 minutes) to enter how many chips you’ve got in your stack at that moment in time. Thus, at the end of your session, you can literally use the graphs to witness and reflect on your progress while reviewing your play! Best of all, this feature is included in the free version of the app.
A good night (left) vs. a bad night (right)
At the time of publication, the Poker Stack app is available exclusively on iOS devices. The developer reports that the Android version is scheduled to be released soon.
