Announcing the Commercial Launch of PokerTracker 4

In recent days, PokerTracker 4, which will surely become one of the most popular poker tracking and analysis programs on the planet, was released commercially. Players from around the world can now purchase PokerTracker 4 and take advantage of its scalable heads-up display, comprehensive charts and graphs, full customization, top-notch table selection, and seamless support for major online poker sites.

PokerSoftware caught up with PokerTracker's Steve McLoughlin to break down bringing PokerTracker 4 to its commercial state. Needless to say, he was fired up, telling PokerSoftware, "We had this vision for PT4 three years ago. That's when we first started developing the application. It's quite exhilarating to finally see our vision, and the vision of our users who contributed, come to fruition."

PokerTracker 4 had over 16,000 beta users, which is quite a striking number when you think about the fact that PokerTracker only promoted the beta version on social media and places like PokerSoftware.

In fact, no beta download link was available from PokerTracker's own forum. And once July 24 rolled around, the commercial version of PT4 came into being.

McLoughlin recapped, "We announced 10 days before the initial release to our existing beta testing users that we would be rolling PT4 out and they were welcome to purchase it. That way, the moment PT4 was available, they'd automatically have their license in place. As a gift to our beta testers, we extended their time frame for using the beta version. They've helped us a lot and have given us a lot of feedback."

McLoughlin candidly said of the beta process, "We never expected the beta to be as big as it was."

A variety of minor fixes to PokerTracker 4 were addressed in the final days before its commercial launch. "The final things added were those that couldn't get done until all of the testing was done. For example, during the beta period, you could only have one note window open. Now, you can have notes open for each player."

Note definitions for tournaments are a major highlight of PokerTracker 4. As if the feature itself weren't exciting enough, poker pro Shaun Deeb, who won four tournaments during the 2012 PokerStars SCOOP, created them. McLoughlin boasted, "Shaun Deeb's notes are all created using effective stack sizes. The notes will be taken based on the way Shaun thinks. He thinks of hands in relation to your effective stack size, so it's a unique opportunity to get inside his head."

PokerTracker 3 users won't be left out in the cold as part of the latest update. McLoughlin revealed, "We are still selling PT3. In fact, we put out a brand new release the other day for PT3 that provides support for PartyPoker for Mac OS X. This was all released after PT4 came out too. We're not done working on PT3 either. We're going to continue to support that platform, but I don't think you'll see a lot of new features added to it. We have so many Mac users who can't use PT4 yet, so this is a way for us to continue with them until the Mac version of PT4 comes out, which will hopefully be in Q4."

PokerTracker 2 users likely remember that the end of life for PT2 was two years after PokerTracker 3 was rolled out, so we'd expect a similar schedule for customers currently using PT3.

What about pricing? First off, a 30-day free trial of PT4 is available. After that, licenses to PokerTracker 4 vary between $59.99 and $159.99. Existing PokerTracker 3 users who purchased their product from PokerTracker directly can get a 70% discount or greater on PT4. If you ordered PT3 through PokerTracker after June 10, an upgrade to PokerTracker 4 is completely free. If you ordered PokerTracker 3 through a third-party vendor, you'll get a 30% discount on PokerTracker 4.

Right now, PokerTracker 4 is only available for Windows. If you have a Mac, you'll need to use a program like Parallels or Bootcamp in order to use PT4. From our experience, Windows 7 works the best if you're using a modern Mac with lots of memory. Overall, lots of memory and a modern computer are needed for a virtual machine because it is a OS within an OS, but with Bootcamp, it is a dedicated Windows computer, so resources are more available.

Visit PokerTracker for more details today!