Using Kicker

Kicker is new poker analysis software designed and created by a team that is passionate about poker, available for any machine running Windows 7 or later.

Watch this video to see how Kicker can be used as part of your poker training regime to analyse poker hands and improve your game.

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Kicker aims to plug the gap between GTO software and HUD software by analysing how your player pool plays poker. We feel this is an underserved part of the poker software market. How often do you find yourself playing against players who are themselves playing GTO poker? In our experience this is rare. And how often do you find yourself without enough hands on an opponent to reliably use a HUD? We often find ourselves in this situation.

This is where player pool analysis comes in.

Kicker does deep analysis of your hand histories when you import them in order to show you all sorts of useful information such as:

• Pre-flop tendencies of the player pool for opening, calling and raising from any position with different bet sizes factored in. (See video here)
• Flop tendencies when players in the player pool are facing continuation bets with filtering of flop texture, different bet sizes and aggressor and defender positions. (See video here)
• River tendencies of the player pool when making river bets. You can quickly see how often players in the player pool are value-betting, thin-value betting and bluffing in these spots with filtering of flop, turn and river textures as well as bet sizing and flop and turn actions to help inform whether you should continue based on the strength of your hand. (See video here)
• Examine your own opening, calling and raising ranges from any position using heat-maps, allowing you to tailor them to exploit opponents and spot leaks you may not be aware of. (See video here)
• The hands that players get to showdown with helping you to narrow their pre-flop ranges for opening, calling and raising. (See video here)
• Build ranges using these tools to help inform you how to construct them, for both yourself and opponents and then test yourself on them using the built-in trainer. (See video here)
• Should you make that call when facing a 5-Bet Shove pre-flop? Kicker analyses all the hands players in your player pool have made those moves with and gives you your equity for your current hand helping you to decide if you have the pot odds to call. (See video here)
• Pick hands from your hand histories for analysis and take them through scenarios and/or flop and river analysis using tagging and filtering. (See video here)

In addition to all of this player pool analysis Kicker also includes a range-vs-range street-by-street scenario analyser that allows you to take the pre-flop ranges through a flop, turn and river assisting you to pick the combos you and your opponent would have made the plays with in order to narrow down yours and your opponent’s ranges based on run-out and actions. You can see on each street how the equities of the hands in your range compare against your opponent’s in terms of both pure equity and also nuts equity and “improvability” (i.e. is this hand likely to get worse or better on average by the river and by how much). (See video here)

During this analysis support is available from the player pool tools to help you narrow down the ranges on each street. There are also graphs available to quickly visualise how your range compares to your opponent’s. Are you ahead? Behind? Polarised? Merged? What is the shape of the strength of your range vs your opponent’s range? Kicker’s histograms will show you instantly on each street the answers to these questions.

Kicker is a thin-client application with most of the processing done on the server and hence does not require a powerful machine to run on. Its memory footprint is small and its processing requirements are minimal. It should run on most basic Windows machines.