Resources to Use When Playing Against Unknown Players

With the one of the biggest online poker festivals going on right now, the Spring Championship of Online Poker (SCOOP) on PokerStars, there seems no time better than the present than to discuss some of the best ways to profile your opponents.
 
While a HUD will provide a good assessment of how your opponent plays, many SCOOP events will have thousands of players in them.  Chances are most of the players at your table you will not have played many if any hands against.  While after an hour or so you should be able to get a good profile on them, there are tools you can use to see how your opponents perform.
 
There are plenty of tracking and rankings sites out there, with the four I most recommend being PocketFives, Official Poker Rankings, Poker Pro Labs, and Sharkscope.  Each can give you an idea of how experienced and how good your opponents might be.
 
PocketFives is an opt-in rankings site where players enter their screennames.  There, you can look at all the tournaments they cashed in, but you will not get an ROI on their play nor will all of your opponents be profiled.  In other words, you won't be able to see if they are profitable players.  What you will be able to see is how they are ranked.  Players ranked high are typically hardcore grinders and should likely be respected.
 
Official Poker Rankings is a great tool to see your opponent's overall ROI.  You can also filter by buy-in segments or months to get a better look.  Many experienced players block themselves from this site to not give their opponents information, but for those who leave themselves open for public viewing, you can get an idea if they are profitable or unprofitable players.
 
Poker Pro Labs is another great site to check out.  You can check many players' winnings, ROI, and profit.  Additionally, their most played games are broken out on this level and you can see their biggest cashes.  The drawbacks are that players can block themselves, which many do, and the recent large cashes are limited to five.
 
The free version of Sharkscope is similar to Poker Pro Labs except you are limited to the number of searches you can do at one time.  The paid version not only unlocks more searches, but also allows you to filter by buy-in and game type, showing you how much your opponent won or lost in the exact games you are playing.  In addition to the site's extensive filtering, you can get a much longer list of their largest cashes.  The two drawbacks are that players can once again block themselves and the benefits over the other sites mentioned require a paid subscription.
 
To summarize, you should use all of the tools at your disposal when playing online poker tournaments, and this may even be truer during SCOOP.  You can play around with all these sites to see how this extra information can help you when you do not already know anything about your opponents on the felts.

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