This article is for intermediate or advanced online poker players who desire to move to the next level by building up their confidence.
Have you sometimes felt like after joining an online poker table, the other players seemed to know if you had a strong hand or not? If you started betting with a monster hand, everyone else would fold. Or if you had a medium strength hand, your opponent would bet heavily, forcing you to fold.
Do not despair, this is a very common feeling. And the most common reason is that you are not using the tools that your opponents are using against you, putting you at a disadvantage. There are all sorts of online poker aids and it is far from obvious to know which ones are really useful and powerful.
The most potent poker tool if you play on the Web is the head up display, a.k.a. HUD. These incredibly sharp programs create a transparent overlay over the poker table that shows your opponents' playing style and tendencies. There are two kinds of HUDs, the ones relying on a local database and the ones based on a large remote hand histories database.
Local HUDs are extensions or parts of programs such as Hold'em Manager or PokerOffice. These software collect all the hands that you have played online and reorganize the data in order to extract the characteristics of all players that you faced in the past. Looseness/tightness and passiveness/aggression are measured and displayed over each player. So that you know instantly what type of player you are facing.
Most people already know and use such products. The first secret is that if you want to gain an additional advantage, you can buy data mined hand histories. By doing so, you can add information about players that you never faced before. So the next time that you sit next to GoldenDonk33 for instance, you may immediately know that he is a dangerous shark.
Alternatively if you had not had such information, it may have cost you a few stacks before you have played enough hands for your local database to get updated and to show this player's tendencies. Note that there are vendors that sell hand histories from poker rooms such as pokerstars or full tilt poker, which frown upon such practice. But there is nothing they can do as it is illegal for them to scan your private computer information in order to detect such purchase.
This first secret is thus a method for enhancing your local poker tracker database by purchasing hand histories, if you already use such software or if you decide to start using them. In the same range of poker tools, and this is the second secret, there is a product that is a remote poker tracker. This product brings the entire concept to a new level.
This program is called poker-edge. What poker-edge does is collect millions of hands over the Internet by using an army of enslaved computers whose only task is to connect to one among one hundred different online poker rooms and to record hand histories. The end result of poker-edge massive data mining activity is that this helps generate a very information-rich HUD for you. But you do not need to maintain a local poker tracker software or to buy hand histories. All such background work is done automatically for you. The final result is the same except that poker-edge players' stats are massive.
It is a matter of choice if you decide to have an enhanced local poker database or if you prefer to have an automated remote HUD. But if you fail to use at least one of the two secrets for building confidence at online poker, then you are nearly certain to wonder at times how come it seems that your opponents know the strength of your hands. But you don't.
Oliver deMetz is a successful online poker player. He reviews and tests online poker software and tools. He has tested datamined hand histories database and remote poker stats database
