Online Poker Data Mining - The Pro Opinion III

Following on from Card Player’s recent report about the data mining dilemma facing the online poker industry we decided to ask a selection of players their thoughts on what has become a very sensitive issue.

Each player was asked if they use online poker tracking tools and if they felt people should be allowed to data mine; is it good or bad for the game, does it change the game at all, and what was their opinion of sites taking action against it? This resulted in a surprisingly mixed reaction which you can read every day over the coming week.

Joe Elpayaa

I personally don’t have much experience with the programs. I’ve never downloaded or used them, although I am pretty familiar with their uses and capabilities.

With that being said, I have always held a morally opposed position to the use and exploitation of programs like this. I believe that it allows people and poker players of a much lesser quality and lacking true talent a chance to try and make money online.

But in reality I feel like these programs almost discourage development as a poker player. I mean obviously there are some distinct advantages to knowing certain specific statistics about any given unknown player, but I feel that as a successful poker player it’s crucial to be able to pick up on player tendencies, game flow and rhythm, remember old situations, and just an endless amount of attention paid to small details which ultimately determine how good you are.

There are obviously a few exceptions to this as always. For example I don’t think programs of this sort are all that helpful in terms of playing online tournaments. I believe they do help give some unknown information, but ultimately if you’re playing an online tournament and making all your decisions based on some statistics from a random as opposed to paying attention to what’s going on and absorbing all the possible information, it could easily lead to playing a very predictable style and most certainly not an optimal one.

On the other hand when it comes to online cash games, where players are playing infinitely more hands, and there are many more dynamics present, the use of data mining and tracking devices seems to present a pretty big advantage. You can ultimately study someone’s hand histories and find leaks to exploit, and basically the possibilities are endless.

I would definitely support the banning of all programs of this sort, mainly because I don’t use them. In the big picture I feel that they generalise poker players, taking away from the unique beauty of a game where everyone is kind of left to walk an unmarked path.

Check out the opinions of French pro Arnaud Mattern and Brandon Schaefer.

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