A few weeks ago, ESPN got viewers ready for its 2004 poker lineup (debuting July 6) with 22 hours of poker in a 24-hour period. It took only two one-hour breaks during the marathon, for SportsCenter at 11 p.m. and 1 a.m.

If that's not a sign that Poker's popularity is rocketing through the stratosphere, I don't know what is.

Many people are discovering the ease of playing poker online or with friends and are following the World Poker Tour like fans of any other sport. What can you do if you want to improve your game? Of course, there are many good books for every kind of player, and they are usually the best place to start. Recently, there have been an increasing number of software programs to jumpstart the poker neophyte or help more expert players raise the level of their game through the use of statistical analysis.

Software that helps you refine your game can be categorized into three different categories:

Historical Hand Log Analyzers

These programs analyze logs of your past activity from various online Poker rooms. Just request your logs from the Poker rooms you play at, then import the logs into the program. Most will consolidate logs from various sites. Programs like these can give you a better understanding of the type of player you are, but you should always be careful when letting statistics rule your play. It can be a one-dimensional way of looking at a multi-dimensional game. These programs also keep track of your opponent's play, so you can develop detailed profiles of your competitors.

Poker Simulators

Simulators set up a full table of robot players controlled by programmable gameplay rules. You play hundreds of simulated hands against these 'bots' and the program analyzes your play to identify hands where your actions differed from what it considers to be the best play. Keep in mind that the program is only as good as the logic it is fed. The biggest weakness of these simulations is that it teaches you to play best in situations that never actually exist in real life. You'll never be at a table - online or off - where everyone is playing by statistics alone. It doesn't teach gut feeling and can never tell you when to bluff. Still, programs like these can be a good starting point to advance from. Once you're comfortable playing by-the-book, you can venture forth into the real world and develop your gut instincts.

Live Play Assistance

Live Play Assistance programs can be categorized into Automated and Manual versions. Both types are run alongside the normal online poker room software. Manual versions are more passive, in that the user manually enters all upcards on the table and the software does thing like spitting out statistical evaluations of your hand, calculating pot odds, or alerting you when you have the nuts. Automated versions are more intrusive, since they automatically detect and analyze all upcards within the software without any user action. That's an uncomfortable idea to many people.

Clearly, having either of these tools at an offline poker game would be considered cheating. But in the online world, where it was long ago considered acceptable for players to have Basic Strategy charts while playing Blackjack, it's not so cut-and-dried a case. The debate rages on, but meanwhile some players at your table are probably playing with computerized assistance.

Cheating and Collusion

More nefarious software packages exist, an example being WinHoldEm, which comes in 4 versions ranging in price from $25 for the Basic Edition to $200 for the Team Edition. WinHoldEm causes such consternation amongst poker players for two reasons. First, the software can "autoplay" hands in live games based on programmable AI. While people may be uncomfortable with the idea of playing against a computer, the reality is usually that these 'bots' play worse than their human counterparts. Much more disconcerting are the Team Features, which allow people to share their cards with others using WinHoldEm at their table. That's outright collusion to any reasonable person, and it has caused most online Poker rooms to come up with ways of detecting players' use of WinHoldEm, then shutting down their accounts and confiscating their funds.

As long as players have access to these types of tools, online Poker will always struggle to maintain the same level of trust of its offline cousin, as it gives anyone on tilt after a bad beat an automatic excuse to complain about rigged software.