Best free poker tracker (2026)

What is the best free poker tracker in 2026?

The best free poker tracker is the one that lets you keep the whole sample, export it, and still gives you the numbers that matter before you pay anything. For live cash, that means fast session logging, bankroll tracking, the true hourly after costs, and a way to understand variance rather than staring at a graph. Overshove is built for that review loop and its core tracker is free. A spreadsheet is still the best free option if you play low volume and are willing to build the missing fields yourself. If you need staking, social posting, GTO charts or a hand database, another specialist tool may fit better even if the free tier is narrower. The honest answer depends on the job, but the non-negotiables are simple: no fake trial, no export hostage, and no sample cap that arrives just when your history becomes useful.

Best free poker tracker checklist

Use this checklist before trusting any free poker tracker with a real sample. First, the tracker must save unlimited sessions or give a clear, generous limit that will not arrive before the sample becomes useful. A cap at twenty or fifty sessions is not a free tracker for a serious player; it is a trial. Second, it must let you export the full history as CSV. If export is paywalled, the free tier is borrowing your data rather than serving you.

Third, check the money fields. A free poker tracker that stores only buy-in and cash-out is a ledger. For live cash, the useful number is the true hourly after rake context, tips, travel and time. If those fields are missing, the app may still be neat, but it cannot answer whether a room, stake or schedule is actually worth playing. Fourth, check review. A serious free tracker should let you mark hands, tag leaks or at least attach structured notes that connect the session to the next study action. Without that, the graph can look good while the game stands still.

Finally, test the habit. Log three mock sessions on your phone, then imagine doing the same thing after a losing night. If the flow feels heavy in a calm test, it will fail under tilt. The best free poker tracker is not the longest feature list. It is the one that keeps the honest sample alive.

What free should not mean

Free should not mean a hidden countdown. Some products let you start, gather the early history, then lock the pieces you need most once you are committed. A trial can still be useful, but it should be called a trial. The problem is the fake free tier that appears generous until the export button, variance view, cost fields or usable history length moves behind a paywall.

Free also should not mean data lock-in. Poker data is personal and slow to rebuild. A year of live sessions carries venues, stakes, game quality, travel, costs, notes, hands and emotional context. Losing that sample is not like losing a theme setting. It changes future decisions. Any tracker that cannot hand the full history back in a clean file should be treated as temporary, no matter how polished the dashboard looks.

The clean model is simple. The core log stays free, the data stays portable, and the optional Founder offer deepens the review rather than holding the record hostage. A player should pay because a deeper tool is useful, not because leaving would destroy the sample.

The criteria that matter, before any names

Many live players already record something, often in a spreadsheet or a basic buy-in and cash-out log. The result can still leave them unable to tell whether they are running bad or playing bad. Free is not the scarce thing here. A tool that turns a log into an answer is.

So before any names, pin down what free should mean. A genuinely free tracker gives you unlimited session logging, the fields that make an hourly true (rake structure, dealer tips, travel), a bankroll graph, and export with no paywall. What it must not be is a trial with a countdown, a session cap that arrives just as your sample gets useful, or an export button that unlocks only when you subscribe. If the free tier cannot hold your whole history and let you leave with it, it is marketing, not a tier.

Then judge the shortlist on five criteria, the same five you would apply to a paid tool. Logging speed: can you log a session in seconds, at the table, on a phone? True hourly: does it capture what the session actually cost, not just the chips? Variance: does it tell you whether your win rate means anything at your sample size? Study path: can you mark hands and tag leaks, or is it a ledger? Ownership: does your data come out as cleanly as it went in? Everything below hangs off those five.

The comparison: eight options, honestly

The table below covers the trackers that come up when live players go looking for a free option, plus the two defaults: the spreadsheet and Overshove itself. Named-tool cells reflect facts from each product's official site or public store listing as checked in June 2026. On pricing, the verified positions were narrow: the spreadsheet is free, PokerLog lists a free tier with a paid Prime upgrade, and Overshove's core tracker is free. The other apps' current pricing was not verified for this page, so check their store listings before committing a sample. The longer per-product breakdowns live in the head-to-head comparisons on this site if you want the detail behind any row.

Pricing is deliberately not a column. Of the named tools, the only tier structure verified for this page is PokerLog's: a free tier with cash logging and charts, and a paid Prime tier above it. Tiers move around constantly, so check the current pricing page of anything you shortlist on the day you decide. The verdict column is about fit, not a ranking; several of these tools are excellent at jobs Overshove does not attempt.

Logging speed decides whether the rest exists

A tracker you abandon does not just lose data, it poisons what remains. Missing sessions are not random: they are disproportionately the losing ones. A sample with the worst nights quietly removed will flatter your win rate every time you look at it, which is worse than no sample at all, because you will trust it.

So test logging speed before anything else, and test it in the worst conditions, not the best. The bar: seated at the table, phone in hand, log stake, venue, buy-in, cash-out and time in under 30 seconds. If the app wants a dozen fields and three screens before it saves, you will complete it after wins and skip it after losses, and the skipped nights are exactly the ones your sample needs. Fastroll built its whole product around fast capture for hands; the same logic applies to sessions.

This is also where free stops mattering. The real price of a tracker is the discipline it demands, and a free tool that demands too much costs you the one asset that compounds: an unbroken sample.

A worked example: what rake, tips and travel do to a 1/2 hourly

Here is why the true-hourly fields are worth insisting on. Take a 1/2 player who logs only buy-in and cash-out: 500 hours over the year, £7,500 net, a clean £15 an hour on the spreadsheet.

Now add the fields the spreadsheet skipped. Live full ring deals roughly 25 to 30 hands an hour; call it 27, which at a nine-handed table means dragging about three pots an hour. In a 10% room capped at £5, most dragged pots at 1/2 reach or approach the cap, so call it £4.50 of rake per won pot, plus a £1 dealer tip. That is 3 x (£4.50 + £1) = £16.50 an hour leaving his stack, £8,250 across the 500 hours, silently baked into the cash-out figure. His opponents were actually losing to him at more than £31 an hour before the room and the dealers took their share.

Travel is the cost buy-in and cash-out never sees at all. A £12 round trip in fuel and parking, across 100 five-hour sessions, is £1,200. His true hourly is (£7,500 - £1,200) / 500 = £12.60, or about 6.3 BB an hour at a £2 big blind.

The payoff of tracking it: comparisons become possible. If a room across town averages £3.00 of rake per won pot instead of £4.50, that is 3 x £1.50 = £4.50 an hour back, a 36% raise on his £12.60 true hourly, before he improves a single street. No buy-in and cash-out log can ever show him that.

The variance read: what a graph alone cannot tell you

The second thing a free tracker owes you is honesty about sample size. Data without a way to interpret it still leaves players guessing. The maths is standard. Live full ring standard deviation runs roughly 80 to 120 BB/100; take 100 BB/100 as the working figure. At 27 hands an hour, one hour is 0.27 of a hundred-hand block, so the hourly standard deviation is 100 x sqrt(0.27), roughly 52 BB.

Apply that to the player above. After 500 hours his measured rate is 6.3 BB an hour, but the standard error on that estimate is 52 / sqrt(500), about 2.3 BB an hour. A 95% confidence interval is therefore roughly 6.3 plus or minus 4.7: somewhere between 1.6 and 11 BB an hour. Half a year of solid grinding, and the honest statement is still probably a winner, magnitude unclear.

That is not a reason to despair, it is a reason to demand the band and not just the line. A bankroll graph that climbs or dives tells you what happened; a confidence read tells you what it means. Any tracker, free or paid, that shows the first without the second is answering the easy question and ducking the real one, and it is exactly how a breakeven stretch gets misread as a collapse, or a heater as an edge.

Data ownership: run the exit test first

Your sample is the asset and the app is just the container, so run the exit test before you commit. Log three real sessions with the full cost fields filled in. Export. Open the file. Check that stake, venue, hours, rake model, tips and travel come out as clean columns you could re-import elsewhere, not a PDF or a screenshot of a graph. Ten minutes, and it tells you more than any feature list.

Watch for the two traps. The first is the trial dressed as a tier: history accumulates for 30 days, then the export button greys out and your sample becomes the hostage in the pricing negotiation. The second is the free tier with a paywalled export, which is the same trap without the countdown. On the verified side: a spreadsheet gives you total ownership by definition, PokerLog's listing states CSV, JSON and XLSX export, and Overshove keeps CSV export in the free tier permanently, beta or not. Whatever you pick, the test stands: if the data cannot leave, do not let it arrive.

Who should pick what, and when a spreadsheet is enough

Route by job, not by ranking. If you stake or get staked, or want a rail following your live updates, PokerBase is built for exactly that. If you want a searchable database of the hands you play live, Fastroll is the specialist, and it pairs naturally with a results tracker rather than replacing one. All-Apple players who want a polished native app should look at Left Pocket, or at Bink if a bundled GTO trainer appeals. If you want to define your own fields and slice standard deviation any way you like, Poker Analytics is one of the most customisable stats tools around. If you want GTO preflop charts and an AI assistant living next to your log, that is PokerLog's bundle. And if the review loop is the point, the true hourly after costs, the variance band, leaks tagged to hands, that is what Overshove is built for, with the honest caveats attached: it is in private beta, on web and Windows today with mobile planned, and free while the beta runs. The head-to-head comparisons on this site take each of those match-ups further.

Sometimes the answer is none of the above. If you play a handful of sessions a month, want a rough net and are comfortable adding your own columns, a spreadsheet is genuinely enough. Its failure mode is predictable rather than immediate: logging discipline decays, the cost columns never get built, and the variance maths stays theoretical. The day you catch yourself asking whether you are actually beating your game, rather than whether you are up, is the day you have outgrown it. Until then, save the switching cost and keep typing.