The Opponents
1. Why named opponents
Most poker software gives you one opponent: a faceless bot that plays every seat the same way. Real tables are not like that. The regular two seats to your left folds everything but premiums. The tourist in seat eight calls every bet with any pair. The kid on the button raises three hands in four. Winning at 1/2 is mostly the business of noticing which one you are up against and adjusting.
So each seat at Alien Poker Club is driven by a named personality: a fixed set of tendencies that decides how often that player enters a pot, how often they raise rather than call, how they react to a big bet, how much position matters to them, and how often they bluff. Each character is tuned to a target profile and then checked, so that the player you sit down with actually plays the way the description says.
They also make mistakes on purpose. A perfect opponent is no use for practice, because nobody at your local room is perfect. The point is that each character makes the right mistakes for that type of player, so the adjustment that beats them here is the one that beats them in real life.
2. The roster
| Player | Type | Guide |
|---|---|---|
| Tight Tom | Tight regular. Very selective before the flop, folds to pressure. | Guide |
| Calling Carl | Calling station. Loose and passive, cannot fold a pair. | Guide |
| Loose Lucy | Recreational player. Too many hands, passive after the flop. | Guide |
| Aggressive Andy | LAG. Raises most of what he plays, bluffs a lot, attacks orphan pots. | Guide |
| Solid Sam | Skilled tight-aggressive regular. Good position awareness, balanced. | Guide |
| Maniac Mike | Hyper-aggressive. Plays almost everything, constant pressure. | Guide |
| Timid Tina | Timid. Calls when it is cheap, folds to big bets, never gets paid on her winners. | Guide |
| Tricky Terry | Deceptive. Slowplays, check-raises, hard to read. | Guide |
| Basic Ben | The baseline player. Every judgment dial set to the middle, no tricks, no leaks. | Guide |
| Agent Arthur | The best player at the table by design. Solid ABC, fundamentally sound, few leaks. | Guide |
| Optimal Olivia | The hardest player at the table to exploit. Solver-derived where our library has an exact answer, our engine everywhere else: GTO-Lite. | Guide |
Five of them sit at the default table, Home Game: Ben, Tom, Andy, Lucy and Carl. The rest are a table choice away: every game starts with a choice of nine tables, from Beginner’s Paradise to The Gauntlet, and Mike, Tina and Terry each sit at one or more of them — no account needed. Signed-in players can also build their own table and decide exactly who sits where.
3. Reading the roster
The first split that matters is callers against raisers. Carl and Lucy call far more often than they raise, so bluffing them is expensive and value betting them is the whole game; a call from either of them means almost nothing. Tom, Sam and Andy raise when they play, so a raise from one of them means a great deal, their calls carry information, and their folds are where your profit is.
The second split is what happens after the flop, passive against aggressive. Mike will bet at you on every street with almost anything, so you have to be willing to let him hang himself. Terry is the opposite problem: he is passive on purpose, which makes his rare raises hard to read.
Every guide follows the same shape: who the player is, their tendencies at a glance, how they play a hand street by street, three adjustments that beat them, and the mistakes people make against them.
4. Sit down with them
You can try a table without an account, which seats you with the default eight. A free account keeps your hand history and lets you arrange the table yourself; it takes an email address and nothing else. Create an account when you are ready, or read how the whole thing works first.