Poker site power over 3rd party software debate.

In light of the most recent pressure from Full Tilt and Poker Stars, here are some interesting points of view in regards to how far the poker sites have gone into regulating which 3rd party software player are using. as you may know, both sites had upgrades recently in order to deter some of the data-mining programs, which include Poker Edge, Poker Tracker and Sherlock.

In general, this means that FT is banning:

1. Bots (refer to 4.4.1)
2. Cooperation between players on a table about the game at hand (ref 4.3)
3. Getting information other than gathered during playing the game (ref 4.4).

I wonder if anyone ever reads this (except lawyers Laughing ). text is at the bottom of the post.

This actually means imho that PT3 or HM is not going to be banned, since I could 'write down' all the information during play.

It might mean that Tournament Indicator is not allowed, since I can follow tables and gather information on tables I'm not actually playing. However, the information on TI is not hand specific, so it's up for debate. I'll try to get an answer on that.

There was a mention of firewalls in reference to how they can tell anything. There are a number of ways you can see what is running on a computer - try running this, for example, from a DOS (Command) Prompt:
wmic process get name, executable Path

OR

tasklist /V /FO csv >tasks.csv (then open tasks.csv in Excel)

Those are built-in programs in Windows. Within programs there are several other ways to get that info also. You can retrieve window titles pretty easily with a program, so it's very feasible that they could search your window titles for SharkScope, or TI, or whatever else they wanted to look for. As for actually grabbing the contents of the window (i.e. from a chat session), that's not as easy but depending on whether those programs encrypt the text when it leaves the program, I'm sure it's feasible.

I think it might be more difficult for them to tell whether or not you are actually playing in a table you are monitoring. Using window titles you could cross-reference them with tournaments and tables you are playing at, but that would be a pretty extreme measure to take, I think, given the complexity of doing that.

Has anyone asked about Tournament Indicator or Holdem Indicator? Based on the odds tab, or the EV listing, is that "advice"? You could really stretch that to say that any books one might have read would give a player an edge over your casual recreational player who hasn't got a clue - is it unfair then? Is it an unfair advantage to play sober if that ruins the fun of someone getting online at 2am, 3 sheets to the wind, looking to splash some chips around? How far can that be taken?

I'm hoping that the "advice" information they refer to is in regards to push/fold real time recommendations, I think one of the programs they talked about actually does that.

IIRC, PT's official reaction to whether or not they will track tables not being played on is (paraphrase) "as long as FTP writes hand histories to the user's hard drive, PT will continue to load those hand histories. If they don't want users to store hand histories for tables which are not being played, then FTP must stop writing those hand histories to the user's hard drive."

Profile your opponents the legal way - watch these videos:

Of course, a legal argument against their decision (FTP's) is not worth much, but still, I think PT has a point - if the hand history is written to your hard drive, you can certainly go and use that history as you see fit (whether you do it manually, or put it in a DB, etc.) Is it unethical to do so? I dunno. Is it unethical to buy every televised episode where Phil H or any other pro plays (i.e. Poker After Dark), study them for hours, and then sit at a table with him and play him? Is it unethical to rail a tournament and make notes on players? Is it unethical to watch PokerStars tournament re-runs and make notes on those in there?

I think if you are willing to do the work for the analysis, when others aren't, it does not give you an unfair edge any more than saying stock brokers are not allowed to use candlestick charts or analysis software anymore. If that software is freely available (even for a fee), then anyone can use it if they want to. If you really wanted to stretch the ridiculous, you could make an argument that programmers are not allowed to play online because they would be able to develop tools that are not freely available to all.

What is fair, I think, is to restrict from things such as decision making software and/or bots, or access into things that are not freely available like was the case with the AP/UB scandals. Those people had information that was not available to any others, observers or players either one. And it was real-time. I think instant messaging and/or phone use can be abused, but only by people playing at the same tables. I would think that if you could track players sitting at the same tables, and then see what kinds of play goes on (i.e. when one has a big hand, the other always folds, or in limit games the other will cap then fold later, etc) - if you could track that, you could probably uncover cheating there, and it would be related to two people (or more) playing at the same tables.

I can put up a chart with push/fold info, hand strength charts, etc. Is it cheating if software does that so I don't have to look it up? Why? Because it's more work? I would disagree that it is cheating any more than reading poker books is cheating. If it spoils the fun of recreational players, then... uh... boo hoo.