hey guys,
just wondering what r the up sides of these tracking programs and which ones r the best for macs?

thanks!

I'm not sure about the Mac part, you may be best searching for that.

There are quite a few upsides to tracking programs like Hold Em Manager and Poker Tracker. Tracking programs let you keep track of your results easily, and track your play to see if you are raising, 3betting continutation betting etc with the correct frequencies. Some sites allow the use of a HUD which lets you follow the same stats on your opponents (Based on your shared hand histories with them).

I use pokertracker which overlays the statistics on the screen. I actually think it takes away a lot from the game but everyone else is using it, and the sites allow it, so you are definitely losing money if you're not. It works really well but you have to play at one site for quite awhile prior to start getting enough data to be useful after just sitting down..

There is also software out there that datamines the sites but most sites strongly frown upon this and I know Party Poker can detect you and ban your account.

Some opinions of sites are that you can do what you want with your own hand histories but if you start swapping them around or accessing mass databases then you're cheating.. How aggressive they are about catching this type of cheating is open for debate, although at least Partypoker is know to go aggressively after them by detecting what you run in the background.

Specifically for macs, you could try Poker Copilot, good poker tracking and analysis with HUD.
Poker Copilot - Hand history analysis and tracking for Mac OS X

Not sure for macs man.

Tracking software is useful for learning more about your game at the very least. I have used such programs several times over my 8 year poker career and my best results have always come when I played with out them. That being said, I would buy holdem manager and start tracking all your stats for a while to see if you like it. Just try not to rely on it too much, reading into the numbers too much can really hurt your hand reading abilities.