Idea for a business

[hackers238]

To my knowledge it hasn't been done, so here goes.

Why not have a program on a server datamine every table at every limit all times of the day and store the information. Then charge people $xx a month to be allowed to connect to it, and query x players a day (I think 1000 might be a good baseline). Then PokerAce could be configured not to get statistics from your own system, but statistics from the central database accessable online.

Now when you sit at tables, you will see stats accumulated over every hand that screen name has ever played at the given site. No more datamining, and no more hassle. Just open up pokerace and go.

[Wes]

It's been done a few times before, and is strictly against the rules of the TOC of pretty much every major site. Once you become known, sites will ban your "service" and if people get caught using it they may confiscate the user's funds.

[Talking Poker]

Right.

The alternative to this is collecting and selling the data (the raw HHs that you then import into your own PT), ala . I don't know if it's against TOS or not (probably is), but I would think it would be much harder if not impossible for the poker sites to detect you using them.

But like everything else, by the time you come up with an idea, someone else has already done it.... and probably many times over. At least that's always been my experience.

[CalifNaughti]

I personaly think that Poker Sites are able to detect much moere than they are letting on. Just look at what happened with d/ling music. They got into the computer and found music.

[hackers238]

So it's against the rules of the TOC to make them publically available, but not to use PT/HUD on your own machine?

Or is it illegal to use PT/HUD as well and I just don't know?

[Wes]

Pretty much.

Poker Edge, Poker Prophecy, and TheCashDB all come to mind for what your idea basically is.

[Talking Poker]

Um... no. They didn't.

[Talking Poker]

You should read the TOS for the sites where you are playing. Most sites are fine with PT and PAHud (Stars, Full Tilt) so long as you are ONLY using data from your own play with your opponents and not an outside source, but some sites don't even want you to do that (Cake).

You can find a list of approved and forbidden add on programs at most sites. , taken straight from their (currently 36 acceptable and 21 banned programs).

[BlibbityBlabbity]

Yeah, in order for them (say FT or PS) to catch you purchasing HHs and importing them into your PT DB, they would actually have to have a program on your computer (see trojan horse virus) that not only accessed your PT DB, but also interpreted the HHs in your DB and looked to see if you had more than x% that you were not involved in (or some other set of criteria).

That is so far beyond a reasonable step and an infringement of the player's privacy. I can't imagine them thinking they could get away with it without HUGE backlash a la Absolute-super-user-etc, etc.

[Talking Poker]

And much more simply put, the RIAA doesn't catch people by sneaking into their computers and looking for music that may or may not have been acquired illegally. They catch them by looking at who is sharing what on the P2P and torrent sites. IP addresses are listed right there, plain as day.

[Kurn]

Actually, for PokerStars, *any* group of HHs you're not involved in would be a violation of thet T&Cs.

[hackers238]

According to the above link from TP for stars:

Wow, those are two surprises. And although they can't "look in your computer" while you are doing things, they most certainly know which tables you have open and for how long. And considering datamining is illegal, it will be interesting to see if anyone gets "busted" for leaving 16 tables open for 10 hours a day while never sitting at one.

[hackers238]

Straight from the stars site. And technically Calif is right in a sense, because the Pokerstars SOFTWARE itself can be a "trojan horse", and there would be little way of us knowing. The only way of knowing would be to physically examine the packets of information the client program is sending to the stars server for any information you don't want to send (ie, the filesystem of your computer), and deleting it. But obviously this is near impossible, as there's no way of knowing that the stars server would accept messages with information deleted, and getting it to accept modified packets would be the near equivalent of hacking the stars server.

Very interesting. Of course I'm not saying that they could somehow "sneak out" your hard drive slowly through you pressing the call/fold buttons, but they could definitely see if your hand history DB was growing while you weren't sitting at a table, as long as they coded it into the stars client software.

Very interesting indeed.

[hackers238]

Sorry for the repeated postings, but here's straight from Full Tilt's TOS

I'm really curious about people getting busted for datamining now!

[Talking Poker]

Just to clarify:

You guys do see that there is a HUGE difference between seeing what other programs you have running while you are playing and actually digging through data stored on your hard drive, right?

I'm not a big fan of it for privacy reasons, but overall, I'm glad they are doing their part to detect bots and other programs that could help people "cheat."

But no one is actually analzying your PT databases to make sure you aren't datamining, etc... come on. There are much easier ways to do it than that.