Play Money HUD?

I've tried trials of both Hold'Em Manager and Poker Tracker, and it turned out neither of them supported play money games. Two questions:

(1) Why are play money games not supported?

(2) Does ANY tracker/heads-up display support play money?

Probably because people who play on those tables can't afford the $80 or $90 that these program cost ?

Yes, but they might want to sample these programs without putting any of their real money on the line.

Still, what is the difference, technically, between play money games and real money games? Trackers and HUD's rely on hand histories, which are, AFAIK, the same for play money games and real money games.

I had the same question a couple of weeks ago. After experimenting a bit, I discovered that I can trick some of these program into importing Play Money Hands. I was not able, however, to get the HUD part to work; only importing hands for analysis worked.

I'll give you a hint, PT3 and Poker Academy Prospector can be tricked. It has to do with removing a certain something from the HH files. Open them up in a text editor like Notepad, select Replace and then Find and Replace All. That will clean up your HHs so that they can be opened. I'll leave you to explore what needs to be removed. Hehe.

Not true! I'm willing to buy, but I want to test them and get accustomed to the way they work without using real money at the tables.

isn't that what 2nl is for?

That's not the point. Sure, you won't have to waste much real money to try out HUD's, but if there's no technical reason not to include play money hands, why aren't they?

I'd guess that the hands are automatically imported into the database and they don't want the $200 play money chips being included as $200 real money and fouling things up.

Awhile back PokerTracker accidentally imported a couple of my $20,000 play chip games as real money tournaments, so my career losses were incredible.

They *can* spend a lot of man hours working around this, but the demand is low and and it's not going to increase sales enough to justify the taking development time away from their core make a money adaptation.

I think otherwise. Just like poker sites offer play money games and freerolls as hooks, the benefits of PTx or HEM or others could be promoted via support for play money. In fact they could do the trials on play money only! I doubt it will happen tho. I'm really thinking this would increase the pool of both real money players in general, and tracker customers in particular.

I too would rather work out how the database and HUD work without investing real money. For instance, I'm still looking for the best table skins to bring out the HUD, and how to alter the visual of the HUD. Granted, I'm still a low real money player, but that might change faster if I could refine my game with the database and HUD and how to use them both better for game improvements.

So for instance, I want to alter the looks of my HUD, adding subtracting, or colorizing it and that is my primary reason for a session. Its a shame I have to invest pennies even when the game at hand is merely a prop for the task at hand (changing the visual of the HUD).

Along the same complaint line, it's interesting the PT3 supports freerolls which are really just play money games with a twist. Makes me think that the option to offer play money support is easy (like it would take less than an hour to do on their end), and all one would really want to do is set up a separate play money database.

The free HUD (voluntary donation) from Realtime works on playmoney tables...that reminds me I should send that guy a few bucks, its been very helpful.

There was just a link posted for it in the January Poker chat thread.

HEM works with play money for me. I had ~15 hands in my database where it thought I was playing 25$/50$.

Strange ... I tried both HEM and the one from Realtime with several poker rooms, and the HUD doesn't show up, and no data seems to be imported. And, yes, I followed the instructions.

Also, I read on HEM's website (the forum, more specifically) that play money is not supported. Maybe they mean "supported", as in "you receive support from one of our employees".

I'd be glad to see a tutorial on how to get any HUD working for any poker room - with play money.

Hey, the Realtime HUD works. Well, mostly works. On Full Tilt it worked for Play Money tournaments but not Ring, on PokerStars is worked for both. Thanks for the tip. I have HEM, but it's nice to have something for Play Money when you're experimenting.

It takes it a little while to show up. I didn't think it was working on Stars at first. Don't know why it wouldn't show up for Ring on FT, but I waited a long time, and it was working on a tournament that was going on at the same time, so I think I had it set up properly.

You're right! Thanks a lot!