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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.

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.

Feedback from Poker Pros who have been involved in Kicker’s development and testing:

“Kicker is a powerful new tool with lots of great features for players looking to exploit their opponents. I particularly liked the features that allow you to analyze in detail population tendencies of pools you play in.” – Dara O’Kearney, Poker Pro and Poker Author

“I’ve had the pleasure of working on the beta testing of the Kicker software. This software can be a game changer when it comes to constructing ranges and analysing opponents play. I can’t wait to spend time playing with the final product and improving my game.” – Ian Simpson, Unibet Poker Ambassador

“This is a great piece of software I've been involved in testing and providing feedback. Really useful for those wanting to take their poker game to the next level. Can never learn too much in this game!” – Jeff Kimber, Grosvenor Poker Sponsored Pro

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. You can also compare the player pool tendencies with your own tendencies and also focus on the tendencies of specific opponents. 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.


Start your free 14 day Kicker trial today using the code 2PLUS2 to get 20% off the monthly subscription cost.

All feedback is welcome and we will try our best to answer any questions or queries in the thread below this post.

Does this software accept Party Poker hand histories?

Hi. Yes Kicker does accept PartyPoker hands.

At the moment hands from Pokerstars, 888.com, PartyPoker and America’s Card Room (Winning Poker Network) are supported.

Party hands not importing, I keep getting this:

We'll need to look into this for you. Can you e-mail support@kickersoftware.com with an attached example of the files you are trying to import?

Thanks

Just to update the thread on this we have discovered that the problem is that PartyPoker have recently reintroduced hand histories (they had stopped them altogether earlier in 2019) with a new structure and anonymised.

So for now, for PartyPoker hands Kicker currently only supports the old style hand histories that PartyPoker stopped allowing earlier in 2019. We will be supporting this new format at some point in early 2020 and will update the FAQs on the Kicker website and this forum thread once we have made these changes.

Since this is server based are your customers effectively giving you all of their hands?

The hands are processed and stored in a proprietary database structure on the server optimised for speed and memory usage. This way rapid results can be derived for the player pool analyses regardless of the speed of the client machine.

We know that some other applications have had problems with having to install local database instances to manage hand histories and we wanted to avoid this. We also tried in an earlier version of Kicker storing hands locally in a compressed proprietary flat file but we regularly ran into memory issues on machines we tested this on once there were significant numbers of hands involved.

In addition we wanted Kicker to be thin-client because as is that case with many applications these days we wanted it to be ready for a future version to be web-based and it would be impossible for lots of hands to be stored locally. We wanted the structure to help facilitate this potential future advancement. Most new applications these days are some variant of "Software as a Service" as Kicker is.

Obviously this does mean the hands are stored on a server. In the same way anyone using a back-up service for their hand histories or anything else would be storing them ultimately in the cloud/on a server.

The hands are only stored to allow each user to extract the player pool data they want to help improve their own game. We are not doing anything else with the hands.

I hope this answers your question.

Does it analyze Hero's play too ( like leakfinder)?

You don't believe what you telling poeple yourself, do you? Saving an encrypted backup in a cloud (not even sure why someone want to do this) is same as giving you plain hh files?

telling you take the hands is one thing, explaining why this is needed with shady arguments is another. Only this makes me question your motives.

Everybody needs to ask these questions whenever a new piece of software pops up. OP's assurances notwithstanding, if nothing comes of the software but he gets 20M hands out of the deal, he can sell them to a Russian botfarm for probably not an insignificant amount of money.

Everyone cool with that?

My motives are and have been from the inception of this software to create something that lets players like myself analyse their play and hands to improve their game. The arguments I have used are the truth. They are the reasons we decided to go down the server route.

The questions are absolutely valid and you are highlighting something that is true. The hands are held on a server and some will have issues with that. We always knew that would be the case.

All I can do is reiterate that the hands are there for rapid analysis without taking up space and processing power on the client machine. We took the decision to make it SAAS and this is a consequence of that.

It does currently allow this for the River player pool tendencies (by checking the "Show me what I do" checkbox).

We do intend to add similar features for the earlier streets in the future too.

As an end-user I'm highly suspect of these sorts of operations done in the name of lean installs. I don't care how fat the install is, I'd rather keep my own hands thanks. Unless the software is doing things that absolutely requires cloud computing power, I'm not interested, and even then, I'm probably still not interested. I'll buy a better computer if I need to.

Hi,

really a pity it can't stand winamax.
This app looks awesome

I created account and started subscription but download link is not working?!

Hi Stumbras

Apologies. I think the problem is now fixed. If you try the link again it should be OK now.

Best regards

Mark

Version check failed - There may be server problems - Try again?

Download link works now but after installation it says:

Hi Stumbras

Apologies for this but we think we have worked out what the problem is.

An older version of the software got accidentally uploaded to the server. You'll need to manually uninstall the version you have and then install the latest version now available from here:

http://liveserver.kickersoftware.com...ker/Kicker.msi

Let me know if you need help with this and sorry for the confusion.

Best regards

Mark

Uploading hands now and looking forward to trying it out. Do you have a roadmap for future features or is it a bit early for that?

Feedback if you want it:

Couldn't see a way to find player pools donking frequency on the flop. Without filters like this I may as well use PT4.

Basically if you add a proper range of filters, turn pop analysis, more heat maps, I'd use it. Especially if sites like runitonce with all hole cards revealed hand histories take off and you add support for those. Otherwise PT4 all players report, GTO and range locking is better isn't it? Even if it is slow.

This looks cool, unfortunately I can't get around poker software that stores HH's in the cloud as it sets a precedent for centralized information power. Please make a version that uses our own computer's processing power - most serious players have good machines for solvers anyway. I'd pay 2-3x your listed price for that.

Thanks for this feedback. We really do want it and it's very useful.

We are planning to add more features and we'll certainly look at what you've said here.

The thing about RIO hand histories with all hole cards revealed is something we have been pondering ourselves because suddenly there is all sorts of analysis we can do that we currently have to do with incomplete information. If those sorts of games start to become significantly more widespread we'll be prioritising support for them.