The Arena and Hand Lab work as one training loop.
The Arena is the game: a full cash campaign against six opponent types with real files. The Hand Lab is where every one of those hands, and every hand from your live games, gets studied. Everything inside Poker Shark lives in one of the two.
The Arena
Six seats. Every hand, one opponent plays you.
This is the game: a six-seat table of opponents with real files, in a campaign from $1/$2 to $500/$1,000. Each hand, one of them plays you heads-up and the rest fold. Watch the signal fire when the calling station suddenly bets the river.
Level 1 of 12 · six-max cash
Loose Aggressive 
Loose Passive Loose Passive 
Regular 
Tight Passive Pot $12
✓ Hand saved to the Hand Lab
The campaign
Build your reads through a 12-level campaign.
Start against loose callers. Progress to opponents who put you under pressure, and one who studies your hands. Pick a level to scout who is waiting there.
Levels 1 to 2 · The low stakes room
Loose Passive
Calls too much and raises infrequently. Practice finding thinner value bets against a calling-heavy range.
The read you train here
After two small calls, weak pairs are still in their range and call another small bet almost every time. Value bet small, and only bluff with a bet over 70% of the pot.
Value bet often and keep thin bets small. Call its small river bets light, but believe its big ones.
Levels 3 to 4 · The high roller room
Loose Aggressive
Plays two thirds of its hands and bets the flop with plenty of air. Practice calling early bets lighter and giving river bets credit.
The read you train here
Their third barrel is almost always real: fewer than 1 in 10 have no pair. Save your bluff-catchers for their flop and turn bets.
Raise its flop bets and 3-bet its opens. Call early bets lighter, but believe its river bets.
Levels 5 to 6 · The solver lab
GTO
Plays a GTO-style strategy from hand-written rules and never adjusts to you. Its leaks are small, so the tier tests whether your own fundamentals hold up.
The read you train here
Its betting and checking lines both hold strong hands. Make the play that stays sound when there is no read to lean on.
Only small edges. When it leads into you on the flop it has a strong hand, and a quarter-pot bet on a dry board is a medium hand.
Levels 7 to 8 · The deep water
Loose Passive, then Loose Aggressive
The first two opponents again, at 200 big blinds. Implied odds, stack-to-pot ratios and postflop room all change. The tier that tests whether the early lessons were learned or memorized.
The read you train here
The same calling-heavy and pressure-heavy profiles with twice the stack behind. Consider how the deeper stack changes which hands can call and which bets can be sized up.
Value bet often and keep thin bets small. Call its small river bets light, but believe its big ones.
Levels 9 to 10 · The gauntlet
Regular
A pro on a fixed playbook that never adjusts to you. Bets small on most flops in position and saves its overbets for the turn. The exam is whether you can find the pattern and use it.
The read you train here
When the flop checks through and they overbet the turn, about half of those bets have no pair. Pick a bluff-catcher that beats a bluff.
Raise its small flop bets and 3-bet its opens. It folds to both more often than it should.
Levels 11 to 12 · The final table
Adaptive
Studies your saved hands and changes how it answers your bets. The main campaign ends against the opponent who studies you back.
The read you train here
A river overbet here can be a bluff or the nuts, because both use the same size. Weigh the spot, not the size.
Its preflop never changes, and it folds most of the time to a 3-bet, so re-raise its opens more. Fix leaks over many hands, because it reads your whole history.
Run rules
A reserve bankroll gates your progression. Drop below zero and the run ends.
The button moves every hand. On odd levels your main opponent sits on your right, so you have position on it in most hands; on even levels it sits on your left. Levels 1 to 6 play 100bb; levels 7 to 12 shift to 200bb deep stack, where SPR management and postflop complexity ramp dramatically.
How the Arena deals
The Arena is built for practice, so it doesn't deal like a real table.
- One opponent per hand.
- Six seats, but every hand is heads-up: one opponent plays you and the other four fold before the flop. There are no multiway pots.
- Who that opponent is.
- Usually the level's opponent: 9 hands in 10 at levels 1 and 2, about half at levels 3 to 10, and about two in three at levels 11 and 12. The other hands go to a player type from that room's pool.
- Your cards.
- In the campaign, you are always dealt a playable starting hand, and your opponent gets a hand it would play from its seat, so you see more contested pots than at a real table.
- Surprise duels.
- Every few hundred hands, a stronger opponent may take the seat for a short duel.
Opponents with files
Five player types modeled on how real players play, plus a GTO opponent.
Every opponent has published stats and documented exploits. When a villain check-raises you, you can look up why.
Mirrored Shades They bluff you less. Table image
Between levels, pick gear that changes how opponents see you. Look loose and they call you down lighter. Look tight and they fold more to your bets. It's the same table image that changes how regulars play you in a real game.
Signals & Scouting
Signals fire at the table when a Loose Passive or Tight Passive shows a tendency, like a passive player suddenly betting the river or a raiser giving up on the flop.
Every opponent's file is open from the first hand: stats, tendencies, documented exploits, and your running results against that type. The Adaptive's file opens later. Against the Loose Passive and Tight Passive, each read fills in when a showdown proves it. Ask about any hand you played and the answer draws only on your own hands and that villain's measured tendencies.
The Circuit: prove you can exploit
A weekly 100-hand cash game. Every hand is heads-up against the Loose Passive, the Tight Passive or the Regular.
Buy in with Shark Coins. Your chip count is your score: climb the money-line leaderboard against the house benchmarks, and the top 10 split the pot. It is the clearest test of whether you can turn a read into chips under pressure.
The room where hands get studied
So every hand you play, anywhere, becomes a rep. Here is one hand's trip through the Lab.
00:00 hand logged
Thirty seconds of typing
Type the hand the way you would tell a friend, or rebuild a live hand seat by seat in the recorder.
Paste one PokerStars hand history at a time and the format is detected automatically, or type the hand in shorthand or forum style. Other sites' hand histories are not supported yet.
00:02 solver pass
The baseline: what balance says
The solver's answer across all 1,755 strategically distinct flops sits underneath every recommendation as the reference point.
00:06 best response pass
The answer for the player who was actually there
Tell the Lab who was in the seat, or let it use the villain you faced in the Arena. The best response engine replays the spot against that file, and compares the available actions. This walkthrough illustrates the workflow; it is not a validated solve of this hand.
00:09 explained
Explained in plain English
Tendency, deviation, adjustment. Every recommendation says why in language you can repeat at the table, and when a spot is outside what we have validated, the Lab says so instead of guessing.
00:12 taken over
Watch it, then rewrite it
Replay any hand step by step, take over at any decision point, and play the alternate line against the live engine.
The exact game state comes back: stacks, pot, board, deck, and the same villain tendencies. The remaining board cards stay the same, so you see how the other line plays out on the same runout, graded against the strongest line for that exact opponent type.
00:15 drilled
Drill it until it is automatic
The Lab is not only for hands you played. Deal fresh hands against any opponent type at 100 or 200 big blinds, branch any decision, and repeat the spot until the right line is reflex.
filed battle log
Every hand, searchable
The battle log records everything: search by villain, position, hero cards, or result. Star the important ones, filter by branch status, and jump from any entry to the full felt replay.
shared with your group
Send the spot to your study group
Generate a public link to any hand and viewers get a full felt replay without logging in.
always your leaks
Your leaks, measured and ranked
VPIP, PFR, aggression by street, showdown thresholds, and profit curves, all from the hands you play in the Arena.
The Lab flags 19 specific leaks with severity ratings and hand evidence: "folds to 3-bets," "folds strong hands to barrels," "open-limps." The career dashboard shows lifetime stats, BB/100 trending, best runs, and profit against each opponent type, plus a scouting report that shows your game the way your opponents see it.
Practice against these opponents for free.
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