"The best things in life are free" goes the saying. Luckily one of those free things is Universal Replayer, an invaluable tool for any online poker player who wants to improve their sit n go game. I'll explain how to use Universal Replayer, but first just to explain its purpose and what it does
What Universal Replayer Does
'Reading' hand histories is boring!
As long as you have set your poker client to record hand histories, each time you play any game of poker, whether it be a SNG or a cash game, a text file is produced containing all information about the poker hands in that game. This text file is stored on your computer and titled according to the date, game number etc. These text files are called 'hand histories'.
Now, that in itself is all well and good. You've now got access to information about how you and your opponents played the hands. Great, but the problem is if you open one of the hand histories and read it (ie will by default open in Notepad if you're running Windows), it's a chore.
So, the good folks at Universal Replayer developed a free (got to love that part) piece of poker software which allows you to 'watch' the poker game, converting the boring text file into a graphical representation. You can play, pause, skip hands etc, amongst other featuers.
This means your poker coach can use this to review games, but also you can too, making it easier to self-review and fix leaks. You can also identify key hands in the sit n go that you'd like to discuss with your SNG coach.
Download Universal Replayer
Get Java'd up first
Woah there tiger, before you install UR you need to make sure you've got the right version of Java on your computer. (I was tempted to make a cheap pun here about spilling coffee on your keyboard but I'm not that immature, honest). So to do this, go to the below page
http://www.java.com/en/download/testjava.jsp
Once you've checked this (and ensured you've got the right Java installed), download Universal Replayer from this link.
When you've installed it, find out how to use Universal Replayer here.