I lied

I guess I was fibbing when I said I had to work second shift all week. I am actually off today for Election Day. The crazy place I work closes down on Election Day. I'm not complaining, after yesterday's 5am to 1am shift (they called me at home almost a dozen times between 8 and 4,) it seemed like I worked 20 hours straight. I could barely keep my eyes open driving home at 1am this morning.

This morning (11:30 am, hey that's still morning!) I decided to try out a new piece of software called PokerSpy. It works with Full Tilt and I still have some bonus money to work off there, so I decided to give it a shot.

Pretty interesting stuff. It tracks the hands for you (as long as you have the "store histories on hard drive" setting selected) and evaluates the play of you and your opponents. At one point in the game, it had all my opponents classified as either "Loose" or "Passive," while I was the only person labeled as "aggressive" at the table. Not coincedentally, I was the only person in positive figures at the table. Every other player was down money, I had doubled my buy in.

It also keeps details on your opponents like how many times they've folded pre-flop in the last dozen or so hands. Or warns if they played lower level starting hands in early positions, or if they didn't raise a premium hand. It displays a chart of all the players at the table, and will give individual reports on each one if you select them.

It's certainly not perfect. It put a warning on my player name when I raised from the SB with A8. Of course it had folded around to me and the BB was very passive so I knew I would just be getting the blind unless the BB had a monster. I took the blind and was happy, but the software saw that as a loose play.

It also displays the mucked cards taken to showdown by your opponents, which is nice info to have. It probably does even more than I'm mentioning, but I only used it for about 75 hands or so. Hardly an extensive test, but fun to try out new things. Does it help? A little. Is it necessary? Hardly. I'd never trade Poker Tracker for it, that's for sure.

P.S. The Poker Comic will be a little late tomorrow as it is on my hard drive at work and I won't be going in until 4:30 CST. I'll post it as soon as I get in, and I promise it will be a good one.