Poker Tracker 3 - Buyer beware

I'm a sucker. I'll admit it. I dished out real cheddar and bought Poker Tracker 3. If you are a predominately a SNG or tournament player, save your cash and wait for something much better to come along. This product is NOT ready for prime time.

The UI looks kind of cool and the reporting has great potential but it is lacking some very important features for tournament players.

It currently does not support importing of manually entered tournament results from Poker Tracker 2. That is correct, if you have spent the last few years grinding it out at Full Tilt Poker playing SNGs and making money, your results history is gone. Kaput. Fin. Without hope.

I tried the beta version out and noticed this right away. I even opened a ticket at their support site. At first, I was told that that feature would be in the paid version so to get it, all I'd need to do was buy Poker Track 3 - the full version (giggle) and my tournament summaries would be converted. Well, they didn't. Sure, they now support converting the Summary file created by the Full Tilt program, but anything prior to the start of that feature (April of 2008) in the FT software is still missing.

This whole process started for me on May 16th. As of today, here is the latest from their support:

Message left on Aug 12, 2008 09:28AM:

Hello,

Let me see, I just got brought in on this and am a little confused. That manually entered tournament results doesn't get converted in the PT2 -> PT3 conversion process is a known issue and it will be fixed in a future release. However, are you saying that your tournaments didn't get converted either?

If so, you could go to Utilities -> Export hand histories to file in PT2 and click the "Tourney hands / Summaries" tab and make sure to export these tournaments to a folder of your choice. Now you can manually import these into PT3, but unfortunately you will for now have to manually enter the results by going Tournaments -> Enter Results in PT3. Hope this helps.

Best Regards,
David Nilsson

by Peligroso [PokerTracker Support]

That didn't help. I'm a degenerate poker player. That's literally thousands of SNG tournaments. There is no way in hell I'm gonna find the time to hand enter in two years worth of SNG histories.

This current version of the Poker Tracker 3 software is really nothing more then beta code that you are paying for the privilege of testing and commenting on. I probably should have spoke up sooner then this, but I sincerely wanted to give them the benefit of the doubt. I really liked PT2. I could follow my results in different types of tournaments and spot trends in my game. All that information is gone.

There still may be hope for this product. They have made some significant strides in the UI over version 2. Another feature that is missing is that you can no longer delete a tournament from the history. I've noticed a few free roll or play money tournaments making it into the import. Once they are in...you are stuck with them forever. This gets to be really confusing when you play a HORSE tournament. It will import all the hands from the hold 'em rounds and then exclude everything else. I'd like to be able to delete these since they aren't reflective of a whole tournament.

The other thing I've noticed is that this program is really slow unless you filter your data. This could be the product of the DBMS (database management system) they are using, but it could also be from poorly written SQL or my guess is that they query each stat for each column separately from each other rather then building a cross column query that would find the results in a single query. I'm thinking like a programmer again...sorry.

If you have the cash and want to participate in this ground floor experiment, go ahead. I wish I could get my money back. I miss my money. I feel cheated and taken advantage of. Maybe this post and anyone that reads it, will make a difference to this company. My 3 months spent on this has been a waste of my time.

Thus concludes my rant for the day. Questions or comments?

UPDATE: I just got this from Poker Tracker Support - this is not encouraging...

Message left on Aug 12, 2008 3:44PM

Hello, Currently there is no ETA for this feature to be added. I can tell you that this is definitely something that will be added, hopefully sooner rather than later. Best regards, Derek

APerfect10 [PokerTracker Support]