Frequently Asked Questions

Poker Shark is for anyone serious about improving — whether you're warming up before a session, cooling down after one, or putting in reps between games. It's especially powerful for intermediate players who already know the basics but want to sharpen their edge.

Every hand you play feeds into a full analytics stack built on your data: VPIP, PFR, aggression by street, profit tracking, and leak detection. The longer you use it, the more it shows you about your own game.

Our opponents are white-box models trained on over 33 million live poker hands. White box means the model's logic is transparent and explainable — we can tell you why an opponent made a decision, not just what it did.

This is fundamentally different from products that feed hand histories into a pre-trained language model and call it a poker engine. Those systems black-box their reasoning and hallucinate tendencies. Our tendencies are measured from real player data and validated against it — every VPIP, PFR, and sizing pattern maps back to actual hands.

Our opponents play like real players — they have leaks, tendencies, and patterns you can learn to exploit. If you can beat them consistently, you're building a genuine exploitative skillset that transfers directly to live and online play.

On top of that, the app tracks your lost profits on every hand, so you know exactly where your game is leaking. And with Takeover mode, you can rewind any decision and try a completely different line — you'll find creative plays you never would have considered at the table.

Build them. Our Build a Villain feature lets you create custom opponent profiles from scratch. Then refine them by uploading your own hand histories through our parse tool — we accept both online and shorthand formats.

The more hands you feed it, the closer the villain plays to the person you're studying. You can practice against your Tuesday night regulars before you ever sit down.

Yes, it's free to play. You sign in with Google or an email address, and there's no credit card and no trial clock. The free tier includes unlimited practice hands, three Arena runs per week, and the first two opponent types, with every hand saved for replay.

Becoming a Patron unlocks the rest: all six opponent types, unlimited Arena runs, takeover branching in replay, custom villains, hand sharing, and the full analytics stack. Patron spots are limited while we're in alpha. Current pricing is on our Patreon page.

Poker Shark runs in the browser, so there's nothing to install, and there's no native iOS or Android app yet. The game works in a mobile browser, but it's built desktop-first: the table, replay, and analytics screens are all better on a bigger display.

Most players study at a desk and use their phone for casual reps. If mobile-first study is non-negotiable for you, that's a real limit today.