Poker Calculator Report: Smart Buddy Poker List Builder

Online poker players that call themselves sharks are often in search of prey utilizing any given poker site’s search features many times per session. They may have a list built into the poker site of players they have played with before and are deemed weak opponents or so-called fish. Good players, rounders you may call them rely on these fish day in and day out.

This brings us to the online poker world these days, where most rounders will have more poker accounts than you or I own coffee cups. Why? It’s simple. The action spreads around, moves around, going from table to table and poker site to poker site. Not only that some players just get sick of one site and need some new scenery, usually to get out of a rut.

Enter a unique type of assist software called List Trackers. A list tracker can monitor opponents you have added from any number of websites and show you where they are playing, what game, and what particular player. The best part about this is that you can be playing one site, and your list tracker will alert you about players on any other site you want it to!

Smart Buddy is one exactly of those unique products. It covers player on multiple sites that play ring and tournament games but also comes packed with a list of famous players you may or may not know about. Or example, Gus Hansen plays under his own name on Full Tilt, but did you know he was “broksi” on Poker Stars or that Dan Harrington goes by “Pickled Egg”?

Smart Buddy is a great tool for finding your favorite pro every time they log on, especially if you like watching high stakes cash games, but smart players will be using Smart Buddy for more biting tactics than that. They want to know where their favorite dinner is, as in helpless little fish waiting to be snapped up in powerful jaws.

Since Smart Buddy works across multiple poker sites, you can also disguise your prowess by alternating targets and going from table to table yourself. In addition you can be the first shark in line on a waiting list as Smart Buddy alerts you, where your other sharky opponents will have to do manual searches.

Some other features of Smart Buddy allows you to create and categorize certain players in however dimension suits you. You can also add your won notes and set up game type filters if you only feel like playing a certain game like Omaha as opposes to nl holdem.

Play Poker Like a Pigeon and Take the Money Home

Author:  Anonymous

Reviewed by:  BaddBeatBobb – The West Coast Terror

This brilliant little poker book (213 pages), published in 2007, stands an excellent chance of turning the careful student into a masterfully disguised limit hold’em ninja.  He boils the game down into two principles:  playing the game, and playing the enemy.  He lays out a step-by-step plan about how to look like a total poker klutz, dish out a whuppin’, leave the game with bags of money, and most importantly, leave the distinct impression that you’re nothing more than a donk who lucked out.  The game is aimed primarily at a live-play audience.  The prose itself is delicious.  Our hero is clearly a story teller, and it is easy to believe that he is also a novelist, as claimed.

            The book begins by explicitly stating its purpose, in big capital letters:  “READ THIS BOOK IF YOU WANT TO AVOID THE LIMELIGHT, YET BE A CONSISTENT WINNER AT THE POKER TABLE.”  His self-disclosure perhaps explains some of his motivation.  He claims to have been knocked out of a WSOP Main Event, just before the final table.  He lost to an atrocious suck-out, pulled off by no less than Stu Ungar, who went on to win the bracelet.  This appears to have been a revelation to our author:  no-limit hold’em, especially tournament style, is a crapshoot, played by those who crave fame.  Steady money can be found at the limit tables, especially with cleverly disguised skills.  Although I prefer no-limit myself, it is refreshing to see a vastly different perspective, especially one with such good humour.

            So, how does one look like a pigeon?  The keys involve image management and a basic knowledge of the crazy odds of the game.  If you can learn to look at a guy giving you a lecture about a bad beat with a blank stare of confusion, you’re well on your way.  If you combine this knowledge with the statistical oddity that any two hole cards will hit a flop hard one time in thirteen, then you have the makings of a donk in disguise.  In an average session of limit, take 15 or so stabs at the pot from ludicrously early position with junk.  Raise it up.  If you hit hard, play it down to the end with all the goofy moves like checking the flop and raising the turn.  Then, when the guy in position (who did everything “right” a la Sklansky) blasts you for having no knowledge of poker whatsoever, you just give a confused smile.  Whenever you miss, you simply dump your hand, and nobody thinks twice.

            My favourite chapter, “Tells Don’t Tell – People Do,” is a critique of tells.  The author considers the notion of Kreskin-like powers of reading a villain’s hole cards ridiculous.  He offers a detailed analysis of the crucial hand between Sammy Farha and Chris Moneymaker from the 2003 Main Event, suggesting that more attention to the betting patterns of the hand, rather than to the man himself, might have earned Sammy the bracelet, instead of having his stack crippled by a stone-cold bluff on the river.  He goes over the players’ behaviours in detail and then replays the same hand as if it were played online, with nothing but betting patterns available.  I don’t know if I’m quite convinced by his arguments, especially after reading Joe Navarro, but it’s a good reminder that at least 90% of what you need to know comes from the player’s actions, not from whether he bets with the left hand or the right.