The Poker Planner Review

www.deadpokersociety.com

The Poker Planner will help you run your No Limit Texas Hold'em poker tournament and is specifically designed to manage poker leagues. This program does very well at tracking players over numerous tournaments and printing league reports about those players. This is one of those programs where you enter your information, start the timer, and then leave the timer alone! It does not track very much live information about the game ... it lets you play.

Installation

The Poker Planner requires a runtime version of Microsoft Access. You can download the program over the internet if you already own a copy of Microsoft Access, otherwise the author will send you the program on disk. There was nothing more to the installation other than unzipping the file.

Configuration

You can't configure too much in The Poker Planner timer screen. The default layout is fine and does display a good chip colors/values chart.

Player Info

Plenty of data can be entered for each player. You can record the email address, home address, phone number, note, etc. for each player. You can print all this information, including a League Leader Board and a Money Leader report. The player information system is a nice feature that should be included in all league management systems.

Chips

There are 11 different chip colors but you can insert your own image of a poker chip that will appear on the timer screen. This is a rather nice feature. The Poker Planner doesn't really tell you how many chips to issue to each player. Instead, it allows you to enter your chipset and then do your own distribution. You tell the program how many of each chip (15 red, 13 green, 6 black) you wish to issue to each player and the program calculates the buyin amount. You keep altering the chips until you get to your desired chip buyin amount. The program shows how many chips are in your set and how many you have left to distribute.

Blinds

There are five preset blinds schedules ranging from a one-hour satellite to a six-hour charity format. There is a four-hour schedule that is the same as the schedule on my Blinds page. You can alter any of the included schedules. You can schedule chip color-ups. The levels and breaks may be of any length. In general, the preset blinds schedules are fine, they progress nicely and don't have any weird chip amounts.

Payout

You can enter the total number of players and the total number of expected rebuys to estimate what the final payouts will be. There are eight preset payouts included and you can also create your own payout schedules. There is a simple % rake off the total purse, there are no other rake calculations possible.

Poker Leagues

You can create numerous poker leagues and then selectively include stats from tournaments played. You can allocate points to players based on their place of finish and you can award extra points for top place finishers.

Track Expenses

This program allows you to track the expenses of running your game. Food, beer, cards, and other expenses may be tracked and printed. You can add your own expense categories. This is a unique feature that I have not found in any other poker tournament software.

Print

You can easily print most of the information included in The Poker Planner. There are numerous league reports that can be printed as well as the player data. You can print Sign-in/Buyin sheets. Simple little things like being able to print out your chip distribution make life much easier.

Cost

The Poker Planner costs $19.95 plus shipping. It is downloadable unless you need a copy of Access runtime, in which case a disk will be shipped to you.

Overall

The Poker Planner is not as full-featured as some of the other clocks reviewed here. It will not track your players as they bust out of the game and it will not calculate a blinds schedule or suggest a chip count. What it will do is allow you to quickly and easily track your players in a league. It allows you to allocate points based on the finish of each player and you can print numerous reports. It does a very good job of keeping player information (name, address, email, etc.) and player stats. If you want a simple timer that does a good job of keeping league stats and printing reports, consider The Poker Planner.

Visit The Poker Planner website

www.deadpokersociety.com

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