The choice of the next generation

T-minus 10 days and counting before the big announcement and everyone at PokerTracker Software, LLC is excited to finally show what we have been working on for more than a year. Although we are not yet done with development, the next generation of PokerTracker is almost ready for its worldwide debut.

It has been an amazing path for PokerTracker; we still find it hard to believe that 10 years ago the first version of PokerTracker was released, along with many of the stats which we take for granted as they are now commonly used even on poker television shows a decade later. Most of you may not remember the original PokerTracker because it was not widely distributed, but in 2003 PokerTracker 2’s commercial release changed online poker as we know it forever. In 2005 Josh Harler introduced the first commercially viable HUD for PokerTracker called PokerAce, this added a tremendous amount of fuel to the online poker boom fire by helping players multi-table, which increased win rate yield for winning online players as well as increased table generation for the online rooms. Eventually Josh and his partner Derek Charles bought PokerTracker with the vision of creating a modern tracking system by combining the data crunching speed of the enterprise-class PostgreSQL server with an embedded HUD and a fully customizable statistic back end built using cross-platform development language C++. The mission from day one was clear, custom statistics would be the way of the future, allowing the end user endless flexibility in presenting highly refined data in any way they want to in both their reports and in the HUD.

PokerTracker 3 was built from scratch without using any of the existing code; it was a tremendous task that took years of tweaking to get the internal engine to hum before we started to refine the “exterior” of the application. Over the past year so many ground breaking features have been added to PokerTracker 3 such as the addition of multi-currency tracking with global currency conversions, the nearly instantaneous FullTilt RUSH HUD, the addition of Omaha support in Table Tracker, the improved Hand History Viewer with street equities at showdown, and the ground breaking tournament type detection and tagging system. Of course we cannot forget the addition of play money tracking post Black Friday, I suspect that PokerStars play money Home Games will never be the same if you know what I mean…

At the same time the tireless PokerTracker development team continued to improve the performance of many sites and networks as their software evolved, often working directly with the development teams or the poker rooms to guide them as they put out new releases. Merge, Yatahay, ENet, Cake, and Everleaf were all added while we continued to tweak our existing network support. Props to our developers for perfecting PokerTracker’s exclusive built in Bodog hand grabber which was quite a tough task!

The brilliance of Josh’s commitment to developing in C++ was the ease of portability. Not only did this allow us to develop the first cross-platform tracker and HUD when we released a Mac OS X version of PT3, it was also helpful in allowing our developers to port perfected code from PT3 to our upcoming PokerTracker 4.

That’s right… you heard it here first. PokerTracker 4 is right around the corner. Are you ready?