Simply lol at this post, they are not hackers. I find PTR ridiculously useful and it provides a lot of interesting info. If PTR is shut down, you'll just get more people datamining hands and sharing only with their grinding groups, so it won't improve the situation - if anything, it will make it worse IMO.
Disagree on virtually all points, at least as far as mining/selling HHs go.
First, when you obviously jump through the hoops they do to get around the anti-datamining steps of the sites, it can absolutely be considered "hacking." Having been a "hacker" myself in a variety of different contexts throughout my 20+ years in the software engineering field, it certainly fits the definition in my eyes.
Second, of course it has interesting info. Illicit info is usually interesting. I've admittedly used it to get an idea of how others see me -- which actually works in my favor now, since my game has improved greatly but I haven't put in the cash volume since to offset my huge downswings early on. Conversely, I've also used it to get an idea of some specific players' overall win/loss records to gauge how good/bad they were (while keeping in mind that it isn't always a reliable indicator, as with me). I don't have as much of a problem with their reporting of results, same as with other sites like HighStakesDB and OPR, and to some degree
sharkscope, that just report results (albeit sites like OPR do it legitimately and with the nod of Stars/FT as long as certain conditions are met). But when you're talking purchased HHs, that's info that you arguably
have no right to if you weren't involved in the game. In a lot of players' opinions, that is cheating and BAD for the game. And regardless of any of our opinions of it, it is categorically in violation of every major sites' TOS.
Third, you won't get more people datamining hands because it's extremely difficult to do on the scale that PTR does it, especially for the most popular sites like Stars and (now, oops!) FT. In case you haven't noticed, Stars pretty much killed routine datamining a long time ago, which is why small-time dataminers pretty much gave up on them. It looks like maybe FT is heading in that direction too. Only the biggest providers like PTR have managed to "hack" through it. They have the resources to develop the techniques and to monitor and screen-scrape massive numbers of tables at once, plus the scrubbing, collating, and packaging that volume of data for sale. And even then, PTR misses an awful lot of hands, due to the imperfect and hackish methods they use to capture the data.
All of that said, my one conflicting view about PTR is that they provide a publicly accessible source of data to investigate and root out cheaters and scandals. Of course the sites themselves have this data, but how often have they initiated investigations and come forward with this information on their own? Rarely. The largest and most prominent scandals and cheats have been uncovered by other poker players using PTR and similar resources to investigate and study suspicious HHs. Only after it became obvious that things were shady, did the sites themselves seem to take an active stance. So I could tolerate PTR's existence a lot more if they simply didn't offer HHs for purchase like they do. Of course then they may not exist since that's probably a primary component of their business model.
