Buddy Lists Offer Method to Find Friends and Fish

With hundreds of thousands of poker players online at any given time, it used to be difficult to not only find friends that you enjoy playing with, but also to find players that you have had a great deal of success against. Programs available for doing exactly that, buddy lists, can be crucial to seeking out friends and foes alike.

The first buddy list software that was developed was for the popular online poker site Ultimate Bet. Developed almost at the same time that the room came online, Ultimate Buddy is a way for users to find other players. Offered for free to those who partake in the action at Ultimate Bet, it is a very useful tool that players could use.

From the time you start up Ultimate Buddy, the program will track whoever you have on your buddy list. I recall (when I actively played on the site) that I often had as many as 25 players on my list, including the site's pros such as Phil Hellmuth and Annie Duke. While it was nice to know when and where the pros were playing, it was more important for me to find opponents who I was successful against.

Ultimate Buddy lets you know when a player comes onto the site and tells you what table they are at, which makes it easy to head to that particular locale rather than search through the lobby. It also allows you to make notes directly in the Ultimate Buddy software rather than through the table. All in all, Ultimate Buddy was a pioneer that other online rooms have since copied.

Both PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker have had buddy list software created for use with those sites. Full Tilt’s buddy list software, called FullTiltBuddies, is an AutoHotKey (AHK) application that essentially copies what Ultimate Buddy does and is available for free. PokerStars’ buddy software, called Stars Buddy List, follows in a similar path.

For those who want to be able to tackle the fish over an array of sites, there is only one program to look at: SmartBuddy. It is a program that was long-needed for the player who doesn’t necessarily play on one site exclusively. With SmartBuddy, a player can track the action on rooms such as Absolute Poker, Bodog, Sun Poker, Full Tilt, and PokerStars in one swing. It not only comes pre-loaded with the screen names of top online and live professionals for those who want to watch and dream, but it is also great for tracking the fish across all of the sites a player may play at. The difference between SmartBuddy and the others is in the price; while the other tracking programs are freeware, SmartBuddy costs $49.99. Even with this one-time cost, however, it is well worth the effort to team up SmartBuddy with any other software you have - such as PokerTracker - and have a full arsenal of tools at your beck and call.

That is the way to look at buddy list software. While you can use poker tracking software to analyze your play and see who you are successful against, it doesn’t help much unless you can find those players again. Through the usage of buddy lists, you can continue to make a profit from your journeys to the online tables.

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