The Dangers Posed By Data-mining Poker Sites

Let me begin this article with a brief explanation of data-mining: Data-mining is basically statistics on a player that you gather without personally being involved in the game. Data-mining encompasses everything from looking up a breakdown of a player’s results to purchasing a large database of hand histories.

What data-mining sites do is put together detailed breakdowns of players or collect hand histories that they will later sell in bulk, and these practices are really bad for online poker.

First off, I find the online poker sites as guilty as the data-mining sites when it comes to cracking down on data-mining. There is no reason for a player’s losing hand at showdown to be shown in the hand history. The reason for this rule in Brick & Mortar card-rooms is to prevent possible collusion, this is unnecessary online -if we are to believe the sites run internal audits to find collusion-and even some brick & mortar card-rooms have started to disallow this, because so many people are unaware of the nature of the rule and feel they have a right to see every hand a player folds. There are better ways to deal with the collusion issue than acting like a jerk and requesting to see a players cards -I say jerk because you are either A) rubbing it in or B) accusing them of collusion.

Additionally, online poker sites need to prevent railbirds from collecting hand histories -most do, but this needs to be enforced by every site.  Hand Histories are like gold in online poker, and the more you have the more you know. Think of it this way; you could be sitting with a player whom you have never faced, and they might have hundreds of thousands of your hand histories! What’s to stop a player from selling millions of hand histories, even if it’s for peanuts, simply for opening a table and hitting “import hand histories”?

Data-mining gives players unfair advantages over other players, and turns poker into some type of strange contest where data collection wins the day, not poker skill or hard work. Personally I’m against even allowing Poker Tracker, Poker Office, or Holdem Manager to be used by players: If you want to know how a person plays poker pay attention and take some notes.

If sites are going to allow this type of behavior -sure they say it’s against Terms and Conditions but how on earth would they ever know you are doing it– than they should take some countermeasures to help players hide their identities, whether it’s randomly assigning a player a number instead of screen-name, or letting players change their screen-names a once a week. A random screen-shot is not going to find the data-miners, who are likely data-mining on sites like Shark Scope or Poker Table Ratings on their laptop while they play on their PC.

It’s time for the online poker sites to take on this problem, because if there is a dollar to be made players and data-mining sites will keep doing what they’re doing.