Last week, while the husband played on one of the online poker sites, someone "accused" him of being a proposition player. Repeating this accusation served to drive other players from the table and it was a couple of hours before playing poker was fun again. The husband complained to the site and received an answer that the other player had been cautioned. More interesting though was the unsolicited explanation that the site did indeed use proposition players but only to get the games started. We were surprised that a site as busy as that one needed proposition players.

Proposition players are real poker players. They are paid an hourly rate to sit at tables that are empty or only have a few players so that other players will join the game. They play with their own money and win and lose just like any other player. They have no special advantage in the game. In fact, a prop player will often tell you that they have a disadvantage because they may have to stay in games that are not going well and they may have to leave a game that is going well.

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Yet most players do not want to play against a proposition player. Some are misinformed about what a prop player is but others just don't want to play against someone who plays that long and plays well enough to be able to play a number of hours a week (many are fulltime) without losing their bankroll. So the accusation that the husband was a prop player made it difficult for him to sit long at a table without people leaving.
If you do not want to play against someone who plays often and well, Party Poker just banned one of the tools that would help. Poker Prophecy gathered statistics on almost every single table tournamant player and turned it into a program that you could run while playing the game. For each player at the table, it would display whether the player was a "Pro", "Average" or "a Fish". A Pro was a player with a winning percentage over 40%. Clicking a tab on your task bar gave you access to more detailed statistics.

There were drawbacks to the program. It only rated single table tournaments. So a player who was very good playing live games might show up as a Fish. If you played tournaments though, it told you who to watch at the table. If tables are loading slowly, you could check out the competition before deciding whether to stay or not.

Source: Blogcritics