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I was in a tournament recently with more than 700 entries on Poker Stars. It was a NL hold’em affair with a moderate $15 entry fee. I made it deep into the money and as the final table approached I started checking out my competition as I fully expected to be a participant.
How do I check out my competition? Well if you have been playing online poker AND living under a rock at the same time, you will know there are several well regarded sources where you can submit the name of your opponent and be served up an abundance of details regarding his tournament performance. Some of the more prominent online sites that provide this service are SharkScope, ThePokerDB, and OfficialPokerRankings.
Some of the pertinent bits of information provided by these database sources are ROI, number of tournaments entered, streaks, in the money percentage, prize money won and much more. A quick scan of these statistics can easily identify your selected opponent as a strong or weak player. Combine that information with some of the tracking a tool like Tournament Indicator provides, and you can pretty much have your opponent pegged before you ever play hand with him.
Now the security at PokerStars.net is top notch and indicative of the leader in online poker, as they have consistently taken (sometimes bold) steps to introduce fairness and security for all its players. This corporate mindset has now engulfed all of the database services I just mentioned here, by recently sending out a notice to those website operators outlining a new policy that essentially negates their effectiveness, as far as using it on Poker Stars anyway.
Poker Stars new position on this is that a player’s privacy should extend to their win/loss and ROI records when playing at Poker Stars and is surmised in the following quotes directly from Poker Stars Security staff:
“We are implementing what the majority of players who have weighed in on this issue have asked for, and are acting in the best interests of the game.”
“Many players have objected to being "called out" in chat by subscribers to these sites for being either heavily losing players, or for being "sharks". They often think that Poker Stars has provided their data to these sites voluntarily, which is untrue.”
“A player that wants to publish his results is welcome to do so, but a player who wants to protect his privacy should be able to do so as well.”
In regards to this position and others that Poker Stars has undertaken, it seems clear to me that they want to be the leader in the market not just by way of volume, but by integrity as well. I think this move blindsided some of these database operators who will now be forced to change their policies to comply with the biggest, most intimidating online poker site.
One thing about Poker Stars is that with the power they have as being a dominant leader, you can at least appreciate that they have you the player and your privacy utmost in their security policies. Nobody really asked them to do that, and therein shows some thoughtful, strategic planning.
Poker Calculator Report: Poker Stars About to get tougher on “bot” like software.
Poker Stars, the dominating force and market share leader is about to take even more steps to make sure that all of it’s players enjoy the fairest playing environement on the internet. Already with the strictest policy in regards to third party assistant software the security department at Poker Stars has decided that they need to go farther due to recent changes in the thrid party programming market.
The changes referred to, are an increasing amount of third party designers creating products that blatantly market and claim to have a dishonest edge for users when utilizing their software while playing online poker for real money.
Last year, I was trying a product called Poker Edge for review when during my testing a window came up from my poker table alerting me to stop using the software. I later received an email saying that if I continued to use Poker Edge or related products my account and the funds in it will be seized by Poker Stars. I was just testing for less than an hour when that happened.
I later got information from Poker Stars administration as to why Poker Edge was not allowed and they clearly demonstrated to me its black hat programming that actually mines data via a community of users. This data, which can display an opponent’s style of play and cash win/loss record can be used by the software user to his advantage. The idea is that you can join a table of players unkown to you and sit down with a dossier of information and history of those players that have happened to be tracked by others who have played with them before.
This crosses the line as far as Poker Stars is concerned as an unfair advantage, and you can lose your account and funds for using Poker Edge and others like it.
To take the fairness issue even further, previously accepted poker calculators like Calculatem Pro WinHoldem, and Poker Pro 2007 which offer “bot” like bet, raise, check, or fold reccomendations will also likely become banned as those features fall under a newly phrased black-hat issue called “programmable profiles” which essentially refers to a software’s capability of offering advice to the user based on an opponent’s style of play.
When you download software from a poker site with the intention of playing online, you also agree to terms during the download process. One of those implicit terms is that the site, in this case Poker Stars has the power to scan your hard drive when they see fit. You could very well assume this is random “crawling” but the speed of which Stars knows you are using black hat software leads me to believe it is much more frequent than random scans.
I think the brain trust at Poker Stars correctly realizes it needs to set the standard in this issue as part and parcel to help maintain its now dominating market share. Other sites like Full Tilt, Absolute, and Ultimate Bet should take note here. In the long run Poker Stars has it right in beleiving that this issue will be an underlying motivation to play at any given poker website.
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