Best live poker apps (2026)

What apps do live poker players actually need?

Live poker players do not need one app, they need a small stack that covers three jobs, and the criteria differ from online poker because nothing is captured for you. The first job is a session tracker fast enough to use at the table, because a live sample only exists if the losing sessions get logged too, and complete enough to record rake context, dealer tips and travel so the hourly it reports is a true one rather than a gross one. The second job is a calculator or two for bankroll, hourly rate and variance, answering the sizing and confidence questions a results graph alone cannot. The third is a study tool that keeps marked hands, tagged leaks and private reads on the regulars you see every week. A HUD is not on the list, because an in-game overlay is impossible live. Anything built online-first and repainted for live tends to fail the first job, which is the one everything else depends on.

The criteria, before the names

Many live players already record something. The problem is what gets recorded: a buy-in and cash-out ledger cannot separate running bad from playing bad, and logging discipline is weakest during a downswing, exactly when the sample matters most.

Those gaps set the bar for any app on this page. Four tests follow from them. Logging speed: is capture fast enough that you never skip a session, including the losing ones? True hourly: does it hold real fields for rake, tips and travel, or just buy-in and cash-out? Variance read: can it tell you whether your sample supports your win rate, or does it only draw a graph? Data ownership: can you leave with your full history as a CSV whenever you want?

Everything else, GTO charts, staking ledgers, hand replayers, room directories, is a feature preference rather than a criterion. Some players want those bundled in and some do not, and the table below treats them that way: real strengths that decide fit, not quality.

The apps, honestly compared

Every named-tool fact below is summarised from the product's official site or public store listing, checked in June 2026, and most of these apps have a fuller write-up in the comparison pages on this site. The verdicts are honest: several of these apps beat Overshove at their own game, and the table says so. Read the best-fit column first; the right app is the one whose core job matches the question you actually ask after a session.

One absence worth naming: there is no HUD row. A HUD needs a data feed, and a live table has none, so no app can show you live opponent stats mid-hand. Any product implying otherwise is describing something that cannot exist. The realistic live stack is a tracker, a calculator or two, and a study habit.

Logging speed decides whether you have a sample

Slow capture does not produce a slow sample; it produces a biased one. The sessions that get skipped are not random. They are the late-night losses, the short frustrated stabs, the nights you did not want to think about. Miss those sessions and every downstream number flatters you.

The test is simple. Time yourself logging a fake session: date, venue, stake, buy-in, cash-out, hours. If it takes more than about 30 seconds on your phone, standing at the cage or sitting in the car, you will eventually skip one, then two, then the habit is gone. Watch for apps that demand a dozen taps before the first field, or that bury cash sessions under tournament flows.

Two design details matter more than they look. Backfilling: how easily can you enter Tuesday's session on Thursday, because that will happen. And defaults: an app that remembers your usual venue, stake and buy-in turns six fields into two. Fastroll built its entire product around capture speed for individual hands; the same obsession applied to sessions is what separates a tracker you keep from one you abandon by March.

What rake, tips and travel do to a £1/£2 hourly

Here is the arithmetic most ledgers never show. Say you put in 600 hours at £1/£2 this year, 120 sessions of five hours, and your buy-in versus cash-out ledger shows +£4,800. That is £8 an hour, 4 BB/hr, a solid rate at the stake.

Now the costs. Live cash deals roughly 25 to 30 hands an hour; suppose you drag four pots an hour on average. If the room takes a capped £3 from each of those pots, that is £12 an hour in rake, and a £1 tip per pot adds £4 more: £16 an hour, £9,600 across the year, paid before your ledger records anything. Your cash-out already reflects it, which is why nobody sees it. Your gross edge at the table was closer to £24 an hour, and the game's running costs took two thirds of it.

Travel is the cost that never enters a cash-out at all. A £10 round trip per session is £1,200 over 120 sessions, £2 an hour off the top. The ledger's £8 becomes a true £6, 3 BB/hr. Nothing dramatic happened, no bad run, and a quarter of the hourly is gone.

This is why buy-in and cash-out alone cannot answer whether a game, a room or a shot at 2/5 is worth your time. Of the named tools above, Bink records tips and expenses inside results; PokerLog and Poker Analytics record an hourly, and the rest either treat costs differently or do not track results at all. Whatever you pick, check that rake structure, tips and travel get real fields, not a notes box.

The variance read, and owning your exit

Many players cannot tell running bad from playing bad, and the honest reason is that the maths is genuinely unkind. Live full ring runs at a standard deviation of roughly 80 to 120 BB/100. Take the £1/£2 player above: £6 an hour true is 3 BB/hr, which at 27 hands an hour is about 11 BB/100. After 600 hours, roughly 16,200 hands or 162 hundred-hand blocks, the standard error on that win rate is 100 divided by the square root of 162, call it 8 BB/100. A 95% interval spans roughly plus or minus 16 BB/100: after a full year of decent volume, the data alone cannot separate that player from break-even.

That is not a reason to skip the variance read; it is the reason to demand one. An app that only draws a results graph lets you conclude whatever your mood suggests. What you want is the interval stated plainly on your actual sample. Bink and Poker Analytics both surface standard deviation, PokerLog offers a what-if simulator, and Overshove frames it as a confidence band on your logged hours. None of them removes variance. The good ones stop you lying to yourself in either direction.

Data ownership is the quieter criterion, and your sample is the asset it protects. A tracked history is a multi-year record that should outlive any app, so the only acceptable answer to can I leave is a full export, any time. PokerLog exports CSV, JSON and XLSX, which is genuinely strong; PokerBase and Overshove both do CSV in and out; a spreadsheet is ownership by definition. Treat a missing or paywalled export as disqualifying, whatever else the app does well.

Who should pick what

If you run staking action in either direction, PokerBase is the obvious starting point: backer tools, multiple bankrolls and social updates are its core, and it is a finished native app on both stores today. If the biggest hole in your game is not knowing what happened in specific hands, Fastroll's per-hand database fills a gap almost nothing else does live, and it sits happily alongside a results tracker rather than replacing one.

Device and temperament sort the rest. All-iPhone players who want a highly polished native tracker should look at Left Pocket, especially if the health and mood layer appeals, or at Bink if a bundled GTO trainer next to deep stats is the draw. Players who want to define their own fields and slice standard deviation every way imaginable should look at Poker Analytics, which also covers Android and Mac. PokerLog fits players who want charts, an AI assistant and a room directory in one free app.

Overshove's honest pitch is narrower than all of them. It is in private beta, free while that lasts, and built around one loop: log the session fast, see the true hourly after rake, tips and travel, read the variance band, tag the leak, study it. No trainer, no charts, no AI in the box. If that loop is what you actually do each week, it fits; if you want the extras bundled, one of the apps above fits better. The comparison pages on this site walk through most of these pairings in detail.

When a spreadsheet is enough

A spreadsheet remains a common primary tracker, and for a decent share of players that is the right call. If you play a few sessions a month at one stake, want a running net and nothing else, and have the discipline to enter every session including the ugly ones, a spreadsheet does the job for free and you own every byte of it.

Be honest about where it breaks. The failure mode is not capability; you can build variance formulas and cost fields into a sheet if you want to. It is that almost nobody does, and manual entry after a losing night is precisely the habit that erodes first. A spreadsheet also has no opinion: it will happily show you a rising graph built on a gappy, flattering sample and never once ask about your standard error.

The practical line: below roughly 20 hours a month, or wherever your interest in the true hourly and the variance read genuinely ends, stay with the sheet. Above that, pick an app from the table by fit, not by feature count. And since decent trackers, Overshove included, import CSV, starting in a spreadsheet costs you nothing later. The sample carries over, and the sample is the only part that was ever worth anything.