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.
