As you are all well aware of by this point, PokerTableRatings will no longer sell Poker Stars hand-histories. Our users our asking for our stance so here it is. We firmly believe that the advantage hand-histories offer is fair and discuss this in detail in our ‘Ethical Datamining‘ blog post. There are many misconceptions on how we get these hand-histories, but in no-way to we ‘hack’ Poker Star’s servers. We simply observe and record the data. Online poker will be a much more dangerous place without 3rd parties having the ability to observe hand-histories and we...

In our last blog post, The Ethics of Datamining Poker Sites, Part One (Common Complaints), we outlined some common arguments given against the practice of datamining poker sites and gave counter-arguments from our personal viewpoint on the situation. In part two of this two part series, we are going to talk about the positive effects that poker data mining has on the Internet Poker community. Som what does data mining give to poker players and the community? By having millions of hand histories daily, data mining sites and the community can analyze poker games on a huge scale looking for...

Poker data mining services are the most important third-party for anyone who wants to play online poker in a safe and secure environment. At the time of writing, online poker is at a tremendous transition point: Countries are finally regulating, poker sites are starting to consolidate, and the DOJ finally shut down US online poker in the Black Friday scandal. Poker rooms are facing more competition than ever, a tough regulated market with significantly higher taxes, a general public weary and less interested in poker, and a poker economy full of extremely talented and smart players. For...

Just a quick note here – we’re running a huge 50% off sale to ring in the new year! Check it out at the official hhSmithy End of 2011 Sale page!

Ah yes, Full Tilt Poker. We all remember them, don’t we? A paragon of security, fairness, and timely payouts. Well, we’ve been sitting on this information for awhile, and since they’re dead and gone, we thought it might be interesting to share with the end users just how… invasive Full Tilt’s reporting tools were. Most of the technical details can be found below from an article/synopsis our Chief Technology Officer wrote some time ago, with a lot of the code and specifics scrubbed out for various reasons....

Yesterday we posted an article about how Bodog’s anonymous tables weren’t so anonymous after all. We accompanied this with a video showing how this was true: Bodog’s response was to cover it up and not really address the root problem: The violation of server-client trust. They went on to say: Your money is and has always been safe at Bodog. If you are concerned about the security of your account, having access to an account number is similar to having a screenname before our latest update. In a future blog post we’ll talk about how the only secure method of user...

(Be sure to read part 2 of Bodog’s security failures!) As many of you are aware, Bodog has completely anonymized their poker tables. They say they’re doing this to protect the “recreational gambler,” the one that is preyed upon by the winning players. (We have a blog post about this “theory” coming in a month or so.) Bodog’s press release on November 30th states: This feature stops poker pros accessing any data on how you play your game via the use of HUDs and other data mining sites like PokerTableRatings and SharkScope. This is totally unique to...

Over the past year or so there seems to have been a growing movement for anonymous heads up tables, and currently they are offered by Party Poker, IPoker, OnGame and some other poker sites. Just how anonymous are these tables and have the poker sites properly implemented this feature? Were anonymous tables not implemented correctly, a few players could bypass the restrictions and gain a very unfair edge of their opposition. Over a year ago the following post showed up on twoplustwo regarding PTR apparently being able to track who is playing on anonymous tables. Apparently the issue was fixed...