Tip: Get software like this free with PTP Rake Rewards.

Overview
Tournament Shark is a piece of software that offers you a few ways to view data on the online poker tournament performance of your opponents. Basically, ProPokerLabs tracks the results of every MTT and SNG played at major rooms online, and Tournament Shark offers you a quick way to reference that data for the other players at the table.

Why would you want this information? Developing quick reads in tournament poker is critical, and when you’re playing online, you just don’t have much to go on. Especially in the later stages of tournaments, tables are combining quickly, and it’s easy to end up in a confrontation with a player for a lot of chips with absolutely no read or history. The data TS provides is a solid starting point for determining the competency of your opponent, information that can provide a legitimate decision-making advantage.

Information provided includes: Total games, Avg profit, Avg ROI (not on PokerStars), Avg Buyin, Recent ITM win rate, and a percentage breakdown of where the opponent tends to finish (early, middle, late and so on).

Pros
The big pro of this software has to be convenience. You can get this data on your opponents elsewhere (most notably Official Poker Rankings and the pokerDB), but other services require you to open an internet browser, navigate to a page and enter player info. That doesn’t sound like much, but when you’re playing multiple tables it’s the sort of extra effort that can be really annoying (and can easily result in a misplayed hand). With TS, you don’t have to do much of anything – just start the program and it automatically detects any tournament tables you have open and loads player information.

You can view player information one of two ways – either with a table overlay (commonly referred to as a Heads Up Display, or HUD) where the data sits on top (placed over) of your tables, or as a module that attaches to the bottom of your tables and lists all of the player data in a table (this module can be minimized).

The appearance and layout of the HUD is easily customizable in a manner that will be very familiar to PokerTracker or HEM users.

You also have a good amount of control over the data that the software presents via a number of intuitive filters.

The software didn’t cause any conflicts or impact the performance of poker room clients when tested, and also worked fine in conjunction with HEM / Pokertracker and the HUDs of those programs as well.

Cons
I think the only major issue for most people will be the price. You can get a trial of the software free, or get a full version by signing up at a poker room through their affiliate links, but purchasing the software straight out costs ~$70. There are no additional costs for accessing the data.

Players at smaller rooms might be disappointed by the relatively sparse list of rooms TS supports – PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker as of this review.

Overall
This is a piece of software that works as it should. If you’re a consistent MTT multi-tabler, you owe it to yourself to at least download the free trial and see if you don’t appreciate the easy access to relevant data on your opponents.

Don’t Forget: Software and other tools like this are available free via PTP Rake Rewards.

When you talk online poker, the name of the game nowadays is data. That’s not surprising – poker has always been, to some degree, about who could accumulate the most information on their opponents (and, of course, employ that information to gain an advantage). Online poker has simply expanded the amount of information available and how players can acquire and utilize that data. Enter HandHQ.com, another entry in a list of sites that caters to the online poker player’s desire for insight on their opponents.

Overview
HandHQ.com is a site that will sell you datamined hand histories. If you’re not familiar with hand histories, they are text files that contain the record of a particular hand played online. By gathering hand histories from the limits you typically play and loading them into a tracking database such as PokerTracker or Holdem Manager, you can gain a lot of insight into how individual opponents play – a critical edge in highly competitive modern online games.

Look
Not the slickest site online, but that’s not really important. The interface works fine, and selecting the hand histories is a quick, intuitive process.

Content
HandHQ offers hand histories from an impressive range of sites: Absolute, iPoker, OnGame, PokerStars, Bodog, B2B Entraction, PartyPoker & FullTilt. PokerStars will probably be of particular interest to many users, as there’s no (at the time of this review) commercially available dataminer for PokerStars.

The game coverage is pretty solid as well, and is likely to continue to expand as the site does. A quick sampling found tens (or hundreds) of thousands of hands available at almost all levels of No Limit on Full Tilt Poker, Limit Holdem on PokerStars, and so on.

Hand HQ is now expanding into fixed limit and PLO and has generally good coverage for both at major sites.

Unique pros / cons
The site is simple to use. You select the hands you want from a series of drop-down menus, are shown pricing options, and then complete a brief payment sequence. It took us about 30 seconds from start to finish. Hands are generally available for download within an hour of purchase and come in a zip file.

You can download up to 7 million hands in an independent batch.

In our test run, hands were easily imported into both PokerTracker and Holdem Manager. Holdem Manager was a simple import; PT required a couple of steps but it wasn’t much of a hassle.

Pricing appears to be tiered on two levels: quantity and buy in level. The more hands you buy, the cheaper the per hand cost is; the higher the limit you request, the higher the per hand cost is. So, for example, 200k hands of 30/60 limit 6 max on FTP costs $130; 400k hands cost $234. By contrast, 200k hands of $1/$2 No Limit on PokerStars costs $14, while 400k hands at the same level costs $25.20. Pricing is always evolving, so check the site for complete details.

Bottom Line
If you’re a regular, winning player and you understand how to use PokerTracker and similar tools, this is a service you’ll want to consider using – especially if you’re moving up or down a level and lack information on the regulars at those levels. If you don’t understand how to use data on your opponents, download a program like PokerTracker, do some research, and then visit HandHQ when you have a better handle on how to employ an opponent’s past play against them.

Get Free HandHQ credits with the PartTimePoker Rakeback Rewards Program!

Overview
TableRatings.com is a site that offers information on the results of online poker cash games and the makeup of active games. Current game data is available from FullTilt, Stars, Cake, Bodog, Party and Titan Poker at all stake levels; historical data is available for FullTilt, Bodog, and Absolute Poker at $.5/$1 NL and higher, and $2/4 Fixed Limit and higher.

Look
I like it. It’s clean, it’s uncluttered, and the main features of the site are right upfront. The site obviously benefits from its singular focus, and the tools it offers are all easily accessible right from the front page.

Content
A site like this is only as useful as the results it provides. According to the site’s FAQ, coverage is “95+ % of the hands that get played on FullTilt (since 4/1/2008), Bodog (since 9/9/2008), and Absolute Poker (since 4/1/2008) at $.5/$1 NL and higher, and $2/4 Fixed Limit and higher.”

Balanced against that claim are multiple anecdotes across several poker forums about inaccurate results. It should be said that a few hands can make a large difference over a small sample, so missing 5% of the hands could account for a lot of those discrepancies. Also, people aren’t always completely honest with themselves about their winrate, so… we’ll assume that the site is not quite as accurate as a pokerDB, but still a pretty good yardstick, especially if you’re dealing with a large sample.

Functionally speaking, the tools work great. Results are cleanly organized, and large amounts of data are presented in manageable chunks, making the whole process easy to navigate.

Unique pros / cons
There are some great little touches to this site. You can watch replays of single hands or entire sessions played by yourself (or anyone). The site has a buddy list feature that will email you when players you add to your list sit down to play online. You can compare your performance to other players directly (or any opponent to any opponent) with the site’s simple (but entertaining) comparison graphing tool.

The site is free for basic use, but you’re forced to create an account if you do more than five searches.

Premium members have access to a host of additional features.

Bottom Line
If you play cash at the sites supported, this can be a very useful tool. It’s also fun for killing a few minutes when your tables are going slow.

Visit PokerTableRatings

This process of finding beatable games and players is absolutely critical for success in online poker. True…..you have a vast amount of games to choose from on a very large number of sites but that still does not detract from the fact that you still need to find beatable games in order to make the game pay. There are an ever growing number of software products on the market but I was amazed at how effective Poker Edge actually is.

Overview

On my travels across many poker forums and doing research into poker software in general, I know that many players are not overly keen on using software like Poker Tracker and Poker Office or their equivalent. It takes time to build up worthwhile databases of information with these products.

You can sit down at a game at a new site that you have just joined and you will not have a single scrap of data on any of the players until you have been on that site for a while. This will force you to play your default game nearly all the time during the early stages and to miss making those key moves that you can only make when you have data on certain players.

This is where Poker Edge comes into its own because you can access a database of literally millions of players and have that data showing on your screen by way of a HUD.

Pros

It is not terribly hard to see the advantages to using this piece of software. Imagine sitting at a table and being able to see just what types of player your opponents are. Is that player to your immediate right a maniac who will be raising your blind almost constantly? Or are they the strong tricky type who will be raising your blind with the correct and proper frequencies?

Also the information is constantly updated in REAL TIME while you play which is a great feature of this product. All of your opponent’s key statistics are shown in a head up display (HUD) and it also classifies each opponent for you as well without you having to do it yourself.

It’s great to be able to see that there are three fish on your table who you have never played with before prior to sitting down at the table. But just like with other available tracking products, Poker Edge allows you to see how your opponents play by street and this allows you to see which players show more aggression pre-flop than post flop and which players will tend to win when it goes to a showdown.

In short then, almost everything that you could want from any tracking software can be found in Poker Edge with the added big advantage that the information about these players is already there waiting for you before you sit down to play. Even the price of Poker Edge is a bonus in my book with price packages starting from as little as $4.95 per month rising to $29.95 depending on the features of the particular package that you want. Finding good games to play in ALL the time has to be worth thirty bucks a month of anyone’s money in my opinion.

Cons

Of course no review would be complete without mentioning potential drawbacks as well but as far as I can see there are only two. The first is that you are somewhat dependent on the software having data on the players who are at that table but this really isn’t a problem either when you think about it because you can still select which tables to play on simply by going on which players have the most reliable stats.

The other drawback is that certain sites do not allow this software and this area is constantly changing and the best way to find out which sites support this software from those that don’t is by simply logging onto www.poker-edge.com where you will see all of the sites that will allow you to run it.

Overall

I have argued for sometime now that you can only get out of any piece of software what you put into it. You simply cannot expect any piece of software to play your game for you. If you persist in playing badly and losing discipline then no software can help you however good it may be. But online poker has reached a stage where you simply need help from somewhere. In my mind I see software of this sort simply as my “electronic number two” that is assisting me to become not only a better poker player but also a winning poker player and that simply has to be worth the effort and money.