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.

Poker Sit and Go Report: Categorizing Your Opponents

You have less than an hour during most sit and go tournaments to find out what your opponents' playing styles are. In some cases you may have to discern that information in less than a few minutes! Surprisingly, there are actually ways to do this.

You may have read about player styles and how they fit into a quadrant first devised by a Ph.D. named Alan Schoonmaker in his landmark book, The Psychology of Poker. The matrix style grid I am referring to in that book, lines up on each axis a tight-loose scale compared to a passive-aggressive scale.

For consideration, a rock solid tight player would be 1,1 on the scale as he is the tightest and most passive of all, and a maniac would be 9,9 having the highest rating for looseness and aggression. You can view the poker profiling grid at this link.

Previously I have written about categorizing your players using an adapted version of Phil Hellmuth's Creature Guide that includes Lion, Elephant, Mouse, Jackyl, and Eagle, along with my own Monkey player profiles. Seems to me a quicker way of identifying your opponents rather than having a grid number like 3,6 attached to player notes. That does not make the grid less valuable, but rather more helpful in placing your opponents more quickly on the grid while giving you somewhat of a double checking sequence.

For instance, if I have identified a mouse at my table, I can pretty much place him in the lower left quadrant as tight and passive. But if later you see him playing J9os in early position you may have to reconsider his grid position and hence his creature profile.

In sit and go tournaments you also have to keep in mind that all players will change their persona as the session progresses and players are taking more consideration of their stack, the blinds, and prize money. These factors can turn a mouse into a maniac, and a Lion into a Jackyl!