Hi everyone I'm Travis from Illinois. I'm 28 and have been playing live poker for about 5 years and just started playing online last year. I am really enjoying playing online and Have really enjoyed reading this forum. I play on pokerstars right now but have been thinking about trying some other sites as well. Any recomendations on good honest sites would be apprieciated. Have a good day and good luck.

hey Travis welcome to the site!

I would suggest Full Tilt Poker. Great site with tons of action but you are already playing on the best site! What games are you playing? Limits? There may be some sites out there that offer rakeback of you feel the need to play anywhere else or sites with good action in some of the other games but pokerstars is already the best for just about every game!

I only play NLHE in one form or another mainly 9 man sng's or HU games. I guess the only reason I want to try a new site is the bad beats on PS seem to come way to often. But hey thats poker I guess. I will probably stick with PS and maybe see some of you on the table sometime.

Cool.

NLHE sngs are extremely popular so just about any site will have them. I am sure that sngmark can embelish on this a little and he even has a website devoted just to sit n go tourneys.

Welcome to the site. Enjoy yourself here.

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Kickboyswoop

Thanks for the warm welcome everyone. I have another question. What 3rd party programs do you guys use to help you play online poker. I have never used any but often I wonder if I should be. I know a lot of people use them because I have been told down to the penny how much I have won and lost in a day or for the week. I have looked at poker crusher a few times but it seems like unless you are playing huge stakes it wouldn't be worth the cost plus pokerstars say they can ban you for using it. Thanks for all the help!

SharkScope - The Largest Online Poker Tournament Results Database

Not very accurate as far as a person playing style but can tell if person is winning or losing player

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Kickboyswoop

Yeah there is SharkScope and all they track are sit n goes and thepokerDB.com (now part of bluff magazine) I believe tracks both sngs and MTTs. officialplayerrankings.com (I think that is what it is) is a decent site as well for tracking yours and others stats. Pocketfives has a ranking system for MTT's that is very "prestigous" for lack of a better word. If you are on the leaderboard there you are a major player.

Those are a few of the big ones but you also might be thinking of software like pokertracker which allows you to track every penny you win, lose, or bet at any point during any hand as long as you have the hand history. Pokertracker even has a heads up display, basically all sorts of numbers and stats that are on each player at the table and all of these random stats tell you various things on your opponent from how many hands they have played to the average amount of time they see the river to just about anything else you could think to track on a player.

Pokertracker is very involved, I personally don't use it, but if you learn to use the stats provided by the software to your advantage you can really improve your game and learn to exploit weakness in others games.

Hi Travis

Welcome to Poker Strategy Forums. I hope you like the site. We have some great members here who are very friendly and helpful.

As far as recommendations for other sites besides PokerStars, you can check check out the Poker Sites for US Players thread the sites are listed basically in order of volume. Like Powda mentioned Full Tilt is a great site but you may also want to check out a site like Cake Poker or Bodog also. The low limit action at Bodog is especially weak.

As for your second question about tracking software. Poker Tracker is probably the most widely used and has a new version out, but I actually prefer Poker Office, it's a little easier to run out of the box and works well. The feature I like/use the most is the automatic showdown of the opponents cards (on most sites), so you don't have to go back and constantly look at the hand history, just to see what they had.

Once again, welcome to PSF

Jason

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I'm Not Lucky, I Have Good Karma !

Big mistake by these players, I've had people tell me this stuff before also, it's foolish for anyone to mention the tools they use while playing in the games. Violates the #1 rule of poker in "not educating the players" you play with.

Poker Tools discussion should be left for friends and poker forums and never discussed with random joes.

Jason

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I'm Not Lucky, I Have Good Karma !