PokerStars to limit tracking of mtt/sng

Poker Stars will not let anybody track sng/mtt in the near future. They have already started with the 90/180 man sng.
They will not show you who won or a list of player to stop data mining and such.
This means sites like OPR,SS and others will not be able to track results.


Thank you for contacting us.

Please note that in our efforts to prevent data mining, we have restricted
the lobbies of many types of SNG tournament. All of the draw and mixed
game Sit Go's are now restricted, as are 90 and 180-player NL Hold'em Sit
& Go's.

'Restricted Lobby' means that once the tournament begins, the list of
entrants and finishing positions of each player are only shown if you
participated in the event.

If you wish to follow the tournament, you can go directly to the tables,
or use the 'Find a Player' feature to find a specific person.
In a very near future, this feature will be expanded to the rest of the
tournaments.

We apologize for the inconvenience this issue may have caused you.
Regards,



You can check it out for yourself and OPR has post a statement on there site that reads:

PokerStars has removed our ability to track certain SnG tournaments. We hope to find a solution soon and meanwhile we strongly encourage you to write an email to PokerStars and kindly ask them to
reverse their decision before they begin to block other kind of tournaments as well.

Do you think this is a good thing or not?

i dont have a problem with what they are doing, datamining sites are kinda evil

That's really just an extension of their policy regarding collection of hand histories. If you have to be a participant in a hand to access the history of that hand, it makes sense that you would have to be a participant in the tournament to get access to whatever data is to be had there.

I don't mind this at all.Everybody always looking people up to gain an edge.I feel if you are decent enough to beat someone you can do it straight up.

I think this is a good way for PS to go. Lets just get back to poker. Wish Ultiment would do the same.Maybe I would go back there.
DuaneK

It removes an edge for a good player, which is a bad thing.

However I can fully see the rationale behind it, I have seen it countless times where players are calling out the table "fish" with the "lol you are $4K down and you suck" type comments. In the end of the day its the player base that caused it. Might encourage some of the super fish to either continue losing or get a few back that have left because of it.

I wish all the sites would do this.

i hate this. i rely on those sites to keep track of my progress.

limiting the tracking just means more work and confusion for me

Buy Poker Tracker.

i will buy PT or HEM eventually, but those programs probably cost more than my bankroll so it doesn't make much sense for me to buy one for now.

This is definitely good news and hopefully a prelude to banning all poker tracking software.

I dont have an issue with sites that track MTT results etc.

Yeah that won't happen. There is nothing wrong with Holdem Manager/PT3. It collects all information you have access to and is different than what these third party poker sites were doing.

Most of the money made by sites comes from players just below or above breakeven. Of course they stay because there are losing players to prey upon.

Limiting OPR is a response to losing players complaining about being mocked but is unlikely to cause many winning players to leave.

If Pokertracker/HEM were blocked then a huge volume of traffic would leave the site for one which allowed it.

This is just part of Pokerstars trying to balance the market, not an ethical or moral decision.

this is really terrible news for people who stake sng players on stars. that's the main issue with it, kinda sucks

it actually probably will lose pokerstars a decent amount of winning players' business imo. stakers for tourneys will now way prefer to have their backed players play on full tilt so they can keep tabs on their horses' results easily

edit: of course, that'd be a positive thing for the other winning players who it doesn't affect, just maybe not the best thing for pokerstars business-wise

Just to note, this is not confirmed, but is what is being widely speculated to be happening.

My view is they are testing the waters to see what the balance of reaction is.

Mutha fker, time to get in touch with teh horse ldo

nah, no problemo, he plays on FTP

why would i talk about your horse? psh, think the world revolves around you dont you!

oh ya, youve got that prince burtis dude or whatever his name is

This is not the best way to track your progress as these sites do not get everything. You should track your progress with a speadsheet if you don't have HEM/PT3. If your computer dosn't have one you can down load free opensource spreadsheets(Lotus Symphony or OpenOffice).

Here's what I received from Pokerstars at 23:45 PDT 4/5/09. Looks like we may be OK, at least for a while on the 181+ MTT's.

Hello xxxxx,

Thank you for your email.

We have no plans to introduce this to our regularly scheduled multi table
tournaments.

Please let us know if there is anything else that we can do to assist you.

Regards,

Michael J
PokerStars Game Security Team

----- Original Message -----
From: xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: 2009/04/05 19:25:39
To: support@pokerstars.com
Subject: question about MTT results

>Hi,
>I noticed recently where Pokerstars has started limiting access
>from certain SnG stats to third parties.
>
>Do you know if this is going to be expanded to 181+ MTT's
>anytime in the near future?
>
>Thanks for any insight you could provide.
>Regards,
>nicklong

QFMFT.

It's for the same reason that Stars has so far refused to introduced 200bb deep tables in cash games like FT does. They say it would give too much of an edge to good players and would just not be fun anymore for the fishes.

IMO, it's in everyone's interest that a certain balance is maintained, no just in Pokerstars'. If you want a game where good players have an enormous edge, play chess. Funny thing, people don't play chess for money. Because it's no fun to lose all the time. Poker provides a nice balance between skill and luck and that's what makes it profitable. Keeping that balance is important. If that requires losing some edge over the fishes, it's probably a reasonable price to pay to keep the overall poker economy running.

I am happy with this, and as far as i know UB and AP do it now to... Coz some site's show me as a rock yet, and we know that ante true

i like to see my stats on these datamining sites as i don't have a pokertracker yet. this is where i review my stats and monitor my progress for now and loosing some of those stats may or may not affect me. but not that really affected... may be when i have enough br then i will purchase PT3 instead.

That's good news. I wish all sites would ban datamining of all kinds.

Also ban use of PT/HUD or other software while playing at a site. Make people rely on notes or their own memories like they have to do in FTF play.

whew u scared me for a minute... Thot u meant they were banning the software for games u r playing. I dont mind them stopping data mining of tables and games you are not sitting in... that is rather piggy datawise and borderline unethical.

I was observing a couple of tables last nite, not to mine data, and PT3 was on. Got a warning from pokerstars that I had reached my limit of observable (tracked) hands...

As much as I like checking my stats on OPR, I think this is a good thing. I don't like to see fish berated with their stats, and it's becoming more common now that the jerk players are finding out about these tracking sites.

Looks as though they have reversed their decision. From OPR

PokerStars on OPR

Recent coverage changes - April 2009


PokerStars recently changed the results display of certain SNG tournaments (27,180-360). Players that did not participate in the tournament can no longer view the results. Instead of listing the players in the result box, they display the following message, "Additional tournament information is available to the tournament participants only"

This has eliminated our ability to collect the results for these SNG tournaments.

We expect PokerStars to extend this to all regular SNG's in the near future if they don't decide to reverse their decision and we encourage you to write an email to PokerStars (support@pokerstars.com) and kindly ask them to reverse their decision if you want your PokerStars tournaments tracked by OPR.

Please don't email OPR about the missing PokerStars SNG tournaments as we do not add them manually.

See the coverage page for what tournaments we track in general.

14th of April 2009:
PokerStars has (for now) reversed their decision and we are able to track the missing (27,180-360) SNG tourneys again.

I don't know how I feel about this in general, but Stars should make it available to have tourney histories automatically save to your hard drive like hand histories. This will make self tracking much easier.

It's a good move in general.

How else are you going stop the unfair advantage.

These programs are making money out of old rope!!!

Information that should be kept private to the players on the table or in the tourney should stay that way.

I haven't been playing online for very long but I was quite shocked when I was in a PokerStars MTT a few days ago where one guy was spewing out numbers for how much everyone was up or down at the table and how long it had been since they cashed etc. I personally think only the people involved in the tournament should have access to this information. I hope this feature is brought back soon and taken up by other sites.

From a very selfish POV, I was aghast when I first learned about all things trackers. PokerTracker even bugged the living shit out of me at first. And data mining sites seemed way too intrusive. That was 3 years (or more) ago, and I now use, and depend on PT. PT is a first level tracker, doing what I should do, but didn't because it was a pain in the butt.

2nd level 'Data mining' is just a collective effort along the same lines. As presented by OPR, SHarkscope, Bluff and others it really is not much different than the Sports section league standings for any game you follow. Baseball, Football, Hockey, Basketball, even Alpine skiing and snowboarding (caveat to follow). But you will notice those are all team sports.

3rd level trackers would be the collective stat exchange that every site has banned.

As for public posting of results, or in the 2nd level case, the private posting of public results;

You won't find quite the same depth for individual sports. Tennis, Golf, Bowling, etc. Skiing is an exception, tho a minor one. Individuals are listed, but the team gets most of the honor, while the individuals win the cash.

The poker sites want something akin to the Skiiers. They want the best to be playing (promoting) such and such a site. So they sort of have to leave results available for general review. It is in the best interests of everyone that everyone can know as much about who they are playing against.

Some of the obvious workarounds turn out to be worse than Stars original solution of limited access. Bots or sitouts come to mind. And larger fees to access the results. So for example, ITPR (I Track Poker Results {fictional}) charges a fee to get the results, and that fee is used to enter bots or sitouts into tourneys just to get results.

Worse might be that ITPR, contacts severely losing players and offers staking just to get the results. Losing players with gambling problems would be tickled to get a rake back for some very small percentage of their losings. Ex; Donkfish plays 10 losers in a row and gets a 'rakeback' of 1 buy-in in exchange for the tourney results from all 10.

So public posting of the results is better than secretive BS.

IMO.

I have always thought that the best way for sites to combat this would be for every player to have access to every other players stats via software provided for by the sites. So at any time, just like we look at our own stats, we could look at the pother players stats at that table at that moment. This would allow the sites to control the historic aspect of established datamineing sites.

I agree with the banning of tracking software also,this allows u to play against a player and not there software