Poker Tracker

For years I played poker in actual cardrooms with actual people.  At first, and for a long time, this was a money losing proposition.  Eventually through experience and books I learned to make money at the low limit games.  Most of the tracking of my progress was very brief and in a summary format only.  For example I'd make a note of each session, the limit I was playing, what I bought in for and how much I had when I cashed out.  There was really no way to gather hand by hand details manually.

Then online poker arrived and suddenly you could look at and store your hand histories.  Even this by itself was a huge improvement, but it was really limited to reviewing single hands which meant that larger trends and statistics weren't easy to do with just a bunch of raw log files.  
 

Enter Poker Tracker

Poker Tracker imports hand histories from all major cardrooms and produces detailed statistics.  With free add ons like GameTime+ you can have these statistics shown on your live poker table in real time as a graphical overlay.  This ability alone makes Poker Tracker a practical necessity if you are serious about playing online poker.

This is just the beginning of the functionality, though.  Inside of the system you can view statistics by limit, by position, by session and more.  Here there will be no fooling yourself, just raw data telling you whether you are beating the rake or not, and by how much in BB/100 (big bets per 100 hands).  You'll also see statistics about your play and the play of your opponents including how often you pay to see a flop and how aggressive you are before and after the flop.  You can also see how much money you win and lose in each position and how much the rake and blinds are costing you over time (hint: a lot).

You can also analyze individual games to playback hands exactly as they were played to help pick up betting patterns and to see where you could have made a different action and perhaps produced a different result.