About PokerCharts

PokerCharts is the poker tracker built by serious players for serious players — independent since 2003, used by tens of thousands of cash and tournament players across seven languages. This is the story of how we got here and what makes the product different from the dozen mobile bankroll apps that came after us.

Where PokerCharts Came From

PokerCharts was created in 2003 by a small group of poker enthusiasts in New York City. The first version was not a product — it was a set of home-grown Excel templates that we used to track our results in low-stakes ring games and the early days of online poker. The templates told us our win rate and not much else, and they only worked when we remembered to copy the file off the laptop before traveling.

That changed the day one of our hard drives failed and took eleven months of poker records with it. We rebuilt what we could from memory, accepted the rest as lost, and decided spreadsheets were not the right shape for the problem. Within a year we had a web-based, database-backed version running for our home group. Twenty-plus years and many rewrites later, PokerCharts is still independently owned and still built around the same conviction — that a serious player's session data deserves serious infrastructure, not a spreadsheet on a drive that can die.

Phil Gordon and the Early Poker Years

The early 2000s were the right time and place to be building a poker analytics product. The poker boom was just starting, online play was exploding, and Phil Gordon — one of the most respected pros of the era and the co-host of Celebrity Poker Showdown — was publicly making the case that systematic record-keeping was the difference between recreational play and a real edge. His quote on the front page of this site ("Are you really a consistent winner? How much do you make per hour? Does the time of day affect your play?") is the same question every serious player still needs answered, and answering it is still what PokerCharts is for.

We have stayed close to the educational side of the game ever since. The hand rankings, ICM calculator, and tournament payout calculator on this site are free to use without an account — they exist because tools that help players think clearly belong in front of every player, not gated behind a paywall.

How PokerCharts Works Today

Today's PokerCharts is a web-first progressive application that runs on every device a player owns. Open it in any modern browser and your data is there — phone at the casino, laptop at home, tablet in the rideshare between the two. There is nothing to install through an app store, nothing to sync manually, and no per-platform feature gap. Sessions you start on one device finish on another without thinking about it.

Under the hood, PokerCharts handles cash and tournament tracking, variance analysis with Monte Carlo simulation, opponent notes and scouting reports, jurisdiction-aware tax reports for the US, UK, Canada, and Germany, hand replay with equity calculation, receipt scanning for tournament buy-ins, session alerts for tilt and time discipline, and bankroll goals with projected target dates. The full toolset is rolled into one product, available in seven languages, and the free tier covers your first ten sessions before anything starts costing money.

What Makes Us Different

The poker bankroll tracker market today is mostly mobile-first apps — Pokerbase, BINK, Poker Income, Poker Bankroll Tracker, Roll, Poker Stack, Left Pocket, Poker Analytics. They are well-designed for their format, but the format is the constraint. Mobile-only means installing through an App Store, accepting the platform's review cycle for every fix, and losing context the moment you switch devices. PokerCharts is web-first by design — the same product runs on iPhone, Android, iPad, Windows, Mac, and Linux because it is one application talking to one database, not three separate native apps glued together.

The other difference is depth. We treat tax reporting, tournament ROI, hand analysis, and opponent tracking as first-class features instead of premium add-ons. Most of the mobile competitors gate those behind a higher tier or skip them entirely; we ship the whole toolset to anyone who reaches the paid plan, and we keep the free tier generous enough that you can decide based on the product, not the paywall. Twenty-plus years of independent ownership has bought us the freedom to optimize for the player, not for the next funding round.

PokerCharts is constantly improving as we incorporate user feedback and think of new ways to help serious players gain an edge through clean record-keeping and honest statistical analysis. As poker players ourselves we want the application to be the very best — please send your candid feedback via the support link, and we will read it.

Cheers,

The PokerCharts Team