There is no doubt that in the long term, online poker can be profitable for skilled players. It is also clear that in the short term luck plays a large part in the outcome of the game and even the best players can lose individual hands or sessions due to short term variance.

One way of minimising the effects of variance is to play several tables at once – this enables a higher volume of hands to be played during a short period. Another advantage of multi-tabling is that a small win-rate can increase dramatically if you can playing 6, 12 or 18 tables instead of 1 table.

If you are anything like me though, you’ll need all the help that you can get with any form of multi-tasking… bring on Table Droid.

Table Droid is a table management system that tiles your tables and enables you to use hotkeys to take actions at the table. It can be used with a mouse and keyboard or with any game controller such as an X-box controller or PS3 controller. It is compatible with PokerStars, Party Poker, 888 Poker and Cake Poker with more sites due to be added soon.

We recently tested Table Droid to see how it performs – here is a short demo video of Table Droid in action:

Why choose Table Droid over other hotkey software like Table Ninja?

1) Cost. For microstakes players the number one reason is that Table Droid is completely FREE, for other stakes it is $59.95 for all sites. Table Ninja costs $59.95 for just one site – you’ll need to pay again if you want to use a different site.

2) Reliability. The makers of Table Droid see their main strength as stability and reliability. Some of the alternative software packages have had a reputation for reliability problems and players have been known to lose hands due to the software miss-clicking! When testing took place we didn’t witness any miss-clicks.

3) Multi-functional software. The well roundedness of the software is a real strength. It’s not just hotkeys – the intuitive tiling engine is excellent and enabled me to use every inch of my monitor screen. The software is compatible with multiple poker sites and with either keyboard and mouse or game controllers.

4) Security. Table Droid is designed and produced by Black Diamond Software – it is an exciting new software company that is officially registered in Toronto, Canada.

5) Customer Support. In short the customer support was excellent. We found a slight glitch with the mouse-wheel command when using windows 7 and we anonymously e-mailed customer support about the problem. They got back to us the next day with a few questions to determine the nature of the problem and within the week the problem was fixed.

Could Anything Be Improved?

The software works really well but I’d like to see a couple more features:

1) xbb and %pot. I’d like to see the possibility to use a hotkey to bet xbb or x% of pot. This would save me time if I am always opening 3bb pre-flop or c-betting 55% of the pot etc.

2) Lobby Closing. With Stars it is a little annoying that the lobby closes (returns to the taskbar) after I join a table – if I want to join a lot of tables I have to open the lobby again after each table. This is not really a major issue as once the tables are open it isn’t a factor.