Importance of Big Blind Conversion Software

As someone who dabbles in cash games, sit and gos, and tournaments, I am often thinking about ways to reduce my thought process when multi-tabling.  Converting both your stack and your opponents’ stacks into big blinds is an effective tool for making proper decisions.

For tournament players, it is important to think it terms of your opponents' big blinds in order to know when to effectively 3bet or 4bet with knowledge of whether you are committing them to call.  It is also important for you to quickly understand your own stack for purposes of your own opening range and 3bet range even if your opponents' stack sizes are all larger than yours.

For sit and go players, understand your effective big blind, which includes taking into account both your stack and your opponents', is important for those who live and die by push-fold charts.

It isn’t just enough to know your stack size; you have to take into account smaller chip stacks ahead of you before knowing if you have a +EV shove. This is also true for tournament players when the blinds get bigger, especially in a Turbo MTT.

For cash game players, many times when I have a lot tables open, I don’t like to think about the money on the table and prefer to think of it in terms of blinds.  This is psychological, as I want to be able to play effective poker without thinking about the money itself.

For all forms of poker, it is important to understand how many blinds are in the pot in relation to your chip stacks.  While you can easily eyeball this, it would be helpful to have a tool to convert the pot size for you for terms of both bet sizing and understanding if your opponent might be committed or can fade away from a medium holding hand.

While when playing one table at a time it might not be important to have a tool to convert stacks into big blinds, it is very effective when multi-tabling.  Thankfully, there are ways to convert your HUDs on both PokerTracker and Holdem Manager into both big blinds and M.  While these tools do not convert the pot size nor adjust your bet slider into big blinds, they are useful for converting stacks into big blinds.

I would love there to be a tool, however, to convert all stacks, the pot size, and your bet slider into big blinds.  I have looked around and there are a couple of programs that used to work, but I could not get to run on my computer for PokerStars.

First I tried DollartoBB after reading a thread on Two Plus Two.  While it was easy to install, I was unable to get it to properly function on my computer on either PokerStars or PartyPoker.

Next, from a Google search, I found LongHUD.  It appears that if I could get LongHUD to work, it would be perfect for what I am looking for, as everyone’s stack sizes, overall pot, and even the bet slider on PokerStars were supposed to be converted into big blinds.  I was quite excited to try it out, as LongHUD had an update in March 2012 where it was supposed to work on PokerStars.

Unfortunately, after spending significant time trying to get it to work, I was left disappointed and frustrated.  The issues were that LongHUD's website and software are in German, which is perhaps the reason I was unable to successfully try out this product on PokerStars.

Both DollartoBB and LongHUD were free programs, which in itself have limitations because of limited resources.  As they need to work within the poker site itself, it is a challenge to keep up-to-date because of the constant updates all poker sites make to improve their software.

It would be great if there were a paid product dedicated to converting stack sizes into big blinds within the software itself.  Until such time, I feel I am stuck with my Holdem Manager HUD to rely on converting stacks into big blinds.