Online Poker Tracking Software
Playing online poker doesn’t carry the same anonymity it once did. It used to be the case, that people would try and take notes on opponents that they picked up general tendencies on. If someone continue bets a lot but freezes after a call on the flop, you’d probably make a note of that in case you ever come across him/her again in your game-playing. So, the astute observer and regular poker player had much more information available to him in determining the type of player attached to the faceless name on a computer screen.
In live games, you can see your opponent and normally play against a much smaller sample size, so the things that they do are easier to remember and associate with each opponent. Who’s really loose? Who tries to bluff a missed draw on the river? Who can you call light? The act of reading an opponent is much easier in person…until recently.
Now, there are many programs at the fingertips of Internet poker players that catch them up to speed, if not surpass the knowledge they could ever gain sitting at a live table.
One of the first tracking sites I ever heard of was www.sharkscope.com. There is a pay version available, but you are also allowed 5 searches free per day, even without signing up. Sharkscope compiles the results of Sit and Go Tournaments, to help you see what you play best, and also to help see what other people play worst.
“Analyze your statistics to find out where you make all your money or use our Tournament Selector to find the easiest tournaments on the internet.”
The tournament selector tool is really interesting. You can find the weakest or most difficult games on multiple different sites. And sharkscope doesn’t just tell you generally which ones are the weakest, they show you sit and gos that are registering in real time, and how good or bad the players in them are. They use goldfish bowls as icons for fish (bad players who just throw money away). The also have individual player searches which detail how many hands the player has played on the specific network (Everest for example), their average stake, avg. profit, return on investment (ROI%) and their overall profit. The Sharkscope HUD shows these stats directly on the table you’re playing at, under the player’s screen name.
www.pokertableratings.com is another site that is completely free as long as you register an email address with them. This site gives you similar statistics, but about cash game poker play, not tournaments or sit and go’s. You can see the biggest wins and losses of your opponents, and even the pros. This can help give you a feel for how they play and get caught up in big hands. The best thing about this site is that it puts the hand histories in a visual game-play simulator so you can see the hands play out, instead of just read the transcript.
