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Texas Holdem training software. Ring games, tournaments, limit and no-limit.
Poker Academy Pro 2 is a strong holdem training software, based on the well-known Poki engine, developed from the works of the University of Alberta.
The user interface is Java-based, read, pretty resource intensive, but usable, provided you close other applications. You may have to switch some eye candy off, depending on your environment. As with other Java applications, you may encounter issues with the sound engine, hopefully you can turn it off too. The design is not spectacular but pretty good-looking overall.
Ring games are available both for limit and no limit, full table or short-handed. You can select a pre-configured table or pick your opponents among several bots with various characteristics. Some are playing out-of-the-box strategies, like the famous Sklansky’s System, or even simpler algorithms. Others are much more sophisticated, with evocative names like Xegreanu or Gus Xansen. The bankrolls, the stakes and the rake are configurable too.
Tournaments and satellites are also available, again for limit or no limit. Many event types are pre-configured, based on the structure of the WSOP, or those of online rooms tournaments. A good deal of information is available once you have started, like the largest, smallest and average stack, you current position, bar charts of the stacks, and so on.
You can enter a personal profile, so as to save your performance and analyze your results with the statistical tools available. That part is pretty comprehensive, with hand histories by categories (ring games, tourneys, limit or no limit), the evolution of your bankroll, and numerous statistics for each street: percentages of flop seen, raises, overall aggression, what hands win you the most money, and even an estimate of how lucky or unlucky you have been. This is fairly exhaustive. The two other tools are a hand evaluator and a showdown calculator. The former is not extremely useful, and the latter is available for free all over the web.
Now, the critical aspect, the strength of the bots. The limit play seems good to me, but this is not my speciality, so the best limit players may find some leaks - though the poki engine, once again, has a good reputation. On the no limit side, the level is not bad, given the difficulty to write a no limit program. However, I think they suffer from some problems that make them very vulnerable to some plays. This means that after playing with them for a while, you should be able to beat them with relative ease, which hurts the longevity of the software.
For the techies, there is an API (if you don’t know what it is you don’t qualify) to write your own bots: this opens the prospect of long hours of investigation…
Eventually, there is an option to play online, against other users, on the company’s servers. The room tends to be pretty empty, though.
Overall, Poker Academy Pro 2 is a good program, with some pretty interesting features and a challenging AI. The pro version is priced $129, which is quite high for poker software. There is a standard version, without the specialized head-up bots and with some analysis tools missing, at $29. Note that as of this writing, there is an online room affiliation offer that gives the pro version as a bonus.
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