Poker Snowie Review – Are You Missing Something Valuable?
Navigation
Poker Snowie Review – Testing App's Strategy
Online poker has come a long way since its modest beginnings in the 90s – from purely text-based gaming clients to full graphical solutions with many advanced options.
Alongside modern poker clients, we’ve seen many additional programs and apps developed with the aim of making playing online more profitable. Poker Snowie App is not an exception!
Some of these tools, such as Poker Tracker or Hold’em Manager 2, was designed to be used while playing and help you make better decisions based on your opponents’ tendencies.
Others, such as Poker Snowie software, were designed as learning tools to be used away from the tables to analyze your play, and make necessary tweaks and adjustments.
You’ve probably heard about this app before, as it is one of the most popular tools among serious players. In this Poker Snowie review, we’ll look into what this software does, how it can help you improve your game, and what are some of its downsides.
What Is Poker Snowie Software?
For those unfamiliar with this piece of software, Snowie belongs to the group of poker tools that are usually deemed as “solvers.” Like the name suggests, these tools offer solutions for certain situations based on the information provided by you and mathematical calculations to give you the best possible answer.
To take it even further, I have to mention that this app is based on artificial neural networks. To put it simply, Poker Snowie learns in a similar way like human brains. It plays against itself and learns from experience, but obviously, does it way faster than would be possible for any person.
Get PokerSnowie FREE Trial and try it yourself!
Poker statistic tools, like Poker Tracker, have been designed with the idea of taking advantage of your opponents’ tendencies. For example, if you know someone opens too wide from the cutoff, you can use this information to 3-bet them more liberally from the button, and expect to get away with it.
It is the exploitative style of play based on our knowledge of the opponents. Poker Snowie app is completely different in this regard as it seeks to provide Game Theory Optimum (GTO) solutions.
This is another expression you’ve probably heard dozens of times and, in case you were wondering, the GTO poker approach is the one entirely based on the game math, and it prevents your opponents from taking advantage of your playing tendencies.
You should keep in mind that the GTO approach doesn’t necessarily have to be the most profitable one. In fact, an exploitative style will likely bring more profits versus weaker opponents.
However, playing as close as possible to the optimum in high-level games may be a good idea as your opponents won’t be making many mistakes and will likely pick up on any of your tendencies fairly quickly.
Of course, No-Limit Texas Holdem hasn’t been completely solved yet, which means there is still no absolute GTO strategy that would be 100% correct. What we do have, however, is pretty close to it, and it is what Poker Snowie will try to teach you.
Is Poker Snowie App For You?
Even before we move on to describing features and options of the software in our Poker Snowie review, I want to make one thing clear. This is a very powerful tool that is well worth the money – but only if you know how to use it.
In that sense, Snowie isn’t meant for complete beginners. If you’re just learning poker rules, you probably won’t get as much from this program. Obviously, it will help you quickly see what is right and wrong, but you may get confused with some of the features.
However, if you have some experience, and looking to take your game to the next level, then this is a great piece of software. It will help you learn and understand GTO and, you’ll be able to understand the message more clearly.
You’re not supposed to just learn every possible spot by heart as that would be close to impossible. Instead, you can look at various scenarios or analyze your own hands and see what the GTO approach would be in different spots.
From that, you can further round up your poker knowledge and get a good feel for what is optimal in certain types of situations. This can be very helpful in spots where you feel uncertain about what to do, and Poker Snowie will offer you a solution.
Poker Snowie Review – Main Features
After this somewhat long introduction, we can finally move on to actually looking into Poker Snowie features. There are several tools that come with the software, and you want to take advantage of that.
Training
If you want to learn about GTO play in general and get the better feel for it, the Training feature is pretty good to achieve just that. You can choose between three different scenarios:
- Tournaments
- Cash games
- Custom
So, you can select the format you’re primarily interested in or use the Custom option to create the setup you want to improve – such as playing from the big blind vs. button open, learning your various GTO ranges when in the cutoff, etc.
Once you start the training, you’ll be dealt different cards every hand, and you’ll be able to get advice for Poker Snowie preflop scenarios as well as on all subsequent streets.
Alternatively, you can simply play through the entire session and then look into what the software suggests in different situations.
You will notice that you’ll get advice about Poker Snowie hands in the form of several options, i.e. bet (raise), call, or fold for four main bet sizes:
- 0.25x pot
- 0.5x pot
- 1x pot
- 2x pot
Each option also comes with the EV number. The EV, or Expected Value, is what you expect to win or lose every time you make certain action, and the entire GTO is based on this mathematical concept, and it completely disregards players’ tendencies.
Get PokerSnowie FREE Trial and try it yourself!
For example, against some players, your EV might be much higher if you bet 2x pot every time with the nuts as they’re calling stations who hate folding, but as you can see in this Poker Snowie review, it doesn’t account for any such anomalies. It gives advice based on the assumption your opponents are also playing a game that’s close to the optimum.
In certain cases, you’ll see that there will be two options with the same EVs, and the software will recommend one option a certain percentage of the time and the second option the rest of the time. This is how you balance your poker hands and can still play a non-exploitable, GTO style.
Real Hands Analysis
If you want to look into some of your actual hands instead of playing pre-programmed ones, you can do that as well. Poker Snowie app will let you import hands into the software, and then you can let the analysis run for a few minutes.
After that, you’ll be able to go through your hands, see what you did in different spots, and compare your actions to Snowie’s advice.
If you’re looking to make your game closer to the GTO, this is a great tool as it gives you a clear overview of your real play at real tables. So, you can go through all sorts of hands and check them out at your own pace and analyze the advice you receive.
Once again, keep in mind that the suggestions you’ll get are based purely on the EV of the situation and the range of Poker Snowie hands that your opponent is supposed to have in the particular spot if they were also playing the GTO style.
Unless you’re playing high stakes or against tough players, it is unlikely that a majority of your opponents take this approach in many spots, so many of your decisions should be based on the stats you have and the previous knowledge of their playing tendencies.
All that being said, looking at the Poker Snowie preflop and posflop advice can be very useful. You’ll often be up against an opponent you know nothing about so, against these players, resorting to the GTO approach until you gain more information could be the way to go. You could also be up against a really good, well-balanced player that you can’t seem to find an edge over, so, once again, you can go to the Poker Snowie advice and adjust accordingly.
For an easy start with preflop solutions, you can grab my free poker hands cheat sheets!
Scenarios
Poker Snowie scenarios will let you set up pretty much any situation you want. You can select the number of opponents, stack sizes, hole cards, and community cards, and get the action started at any point in the hand. These scenarios are very flexible and can be a great learning resource.
If you feel like there are particular spots that you don’t play well or are uncertain about, you can set up scenarios to mimic these situations in terms of cards, stack depths, etc. Then, you can check the Poker Snowie advice to discover what the GTO play in these situations is.
For example, you’re wondering what would be the optimum range to call with after you open from UTG on a 6-max table and face a 3-bet shove for 30 big blinds effective. Or you want to know what the best play is when you have a small suited Ace in a small blind with 20 big blinds when facing an open and two callers. You can set up this situation and see what Snowie suggests – this may be a surprise for you, but it is a fold.
You can set up these various scenarios and use them to practice for as much as you like – or at least until you run out of scenarios for your monthly subscription, which we’ll cover at the end of this Poker Snowie review.
Advantages of Poker Snowie Strategy
As mentioned several times already, this tool can teach you how to play close to the optimal style that can’t be exploited. The main idea behind this approach is that no matter what your opponents’ do, you will be winning or breaking even at worst. So, if you were to learn everything there is to know about the GTO, you could play an almost perfect game in the sense that you’d virtually never make mathematical mistakes.
Learning what this means is very important for your development as a poker player since, as you progress, you’ll be facing increasingly tougher opponents who’ll have very few leaks in their games and will be keen to take advantage of any mistakes they may find in your play.
So, adapting and learning this strategy is vital, but you probably shouldn’t approach this process with the mind of just trying to memorize as many spots and sticking to them. While this may be required at the highest of levels where mistakes and bad players are a few, and far between, for most players, Poker Snowie software should be one of the additional poker tools that gives you a different perspective of the game.
Poker Snowie Cons
There is no doubt that Poker Snowie is a powerful tool for game analysis but, as already emphasized, it is fairly rigid and only optimized for GTO play. For example, Snowie will never suggest you call off a 100 big blinds UTG shove with 99, but if you’re playing at a table where there is the player who blind shoves every hand, how can you not call with the hand as strong as this?
So the biggest downside of this app is that Snowie does not take tendencies, reads, or various situations in its decision making.
In a way, the Snowie approach to the game can seem “boring” as it is pretty much set in stone and doesn’t account for any players’ tendencies or stats. Of course, this shouldn’t bother you if you’re a serious player set on becoming better, but looking at the things from this pure EV perspective without any other considerations does take some adjusting to.
In the same vein, you can’t do anything with Poker Snowie hand ranges. They’re set according to the software AI (artificial intelligence), and you can’t change or tweak them in any way. On the one hand, being able to change ranges would kind of defeat the purpose of the software but, having options to implement at least some tweaks seems like it would make the software better.
Poker Snowie Pricing & Conclusion
So, all in all, this is a piece of poker software that you’ll want to have in your collection of tools if you want to work on your game and continue to grow as a player. As far as pricing is concerned, you can get two different versions of Poker Snowie App:
- Intermediate ($99 a year)
- Pro ($229.95 a year)
For the serious analysis, you’ll want to get the Pro version, as it includes the standard features as well as Poker Snowie Hand Range and Range Advice as well as 120,000 real money hands you can analyze every month (the Intermediate version only includes 8,000). Finally, with the Pro version, you also get 3,000 scenarios a month vs. 1,200 included in the Intermediate one. Both versions also have mobile apps you can install on your phone.
As far as the value for money is concerned, Poker Snowie is easily worth it.
Obviously, you need to be willing to take time and use the advantages of this software, but you have a number of options to work on your game! As long as you’re keen on learning the GTO approach and implementing some of its aspects in your game, you won’t be disappointed by this app.