If you've tried it, tell us what you think.

bump

this is my first post here and i'm sorry it has to be a negative one.

yeah i've tried it.
dont' get this or ANY of these programs!
it's on my computer and i regret ever wasting my sign up bonus code on this piece of spyware!
i'm a network and systems security engineer and against my better judgement i installed this on my computer, cause it was free, so why not.....maybe it could improve my game. stupid, stupid, stupid
i'm not gonna evaluate the program itself because this is now irrelevant after my experience with this thing and what i subsequently found out about this company who owns and distributes it.
i'm in the process of studying what this program does over the internet on a packet level and trying to figure out what it's phoning home but it doesnt look good.
Holdem genius is owned by a company called Mutatum Solutions, they also own Texas Calculatem, CalculatemPro, Sit & Go Shark and Coach Rounder to name a few. Bet you thought holdem genius and the calculatem line were different programs by a different company right...? I did for a while.

Here's the thing i'm looking into: all of these programs require internet access, supposedly for license verification only. BUT they require internet access constantly. they are always talking to some server somewhere for some reason. no one knows exactly why and if you ask the company which fronts for all of these programs they'll tell you "for verification". that's BS!
do you own much software which after you input your license or serial number needs to talk to the company server all the time??
if you have a firewall, software or hardware, just try blocking these programs AFTER they have verified your license. you will find that they all cease to function until you open up the firewall for them again.
It gets much better.... all of our favorite and trusted poker sites have deals with this company where they pay $ to them for us to use the bonus code to get their software for "free". there is a price to be paid though.
i'm not saying that full tilt or pokerstars or any of the other poker sites we kinda trust these days are complicit in the coming scam and violation of our privacy, but they're gonna feel the loss of trust from their players (US!) if it turns out that what i suspect is happening goes down.
i'm still looking into exactly what holdem genius, et al are sending back to their masters, but it doesn't look good.
you've heard about the latest in poker software, the 1-2 million player database software which you pay a yearly license for and which says will give you pokertracker or pokeroffice quality realtime stats on anyone who plays online??
how can that be? do they have so many data mining bots out there on every poker site scooping up info on every player everywhere?
that takes a lot of computers and a lot of complicity on many levels. how easy is it for us to datamine on our fav site? you've got to get to the tables and log all the activity, BUT you've got to sign on the site and choose a table to mine. that's a lot of resources to commit to mining if you intend to mine EVERYTHING.
wouldn't it be easier just to distribute a "free program" spyware/trojan/virus , if you will, to people trying to learn to play poker or those who want to plug leaks in their games and have THOSE people data mine for you?
look up your online handle on sharkscope one day. how do they have everything you've done in any poker room. hell, they have better stats on me than I do! and they have it on you as well.
also interestingly enough, sharkscope, which as far as i've discoved so far is not owned by Mutatem, didn't have any stats on me UNTIL i installed Holdem Genius. my history on sharkscope begins on the very day i installed holdem genius. see if it is the same for you. it's quite a coincidence i think.
ANYWAY, like i said, i'm still looking into this apparent scam, but if it pans out and these proggies ARE sending back our own hand histories and those of everyone on the tables on which we play to their masters, then this is gonna be a sad sad day for online poker. forget the absolute poker fiasco...this is much bigger.
oh yeah...here's the latest announcement of the NEWEST software offering from Mutatem..."POKER CRUSHER"

link provided for verification: http://www.progambling.us/article.cfm/id/233180

Please post results of your findings when you have them.

It would certainly be alarming if their "assistant" applications are basically cover for a massive distributed datamining network, for which they then sell monthly access.

The sites themselves are almost certainly not complicit by issuing "bonus codes" etc. - those are just plain affiliate plans imo, anyone can get one set up.

Best "online poker is rigged" 1st post ever.

(I do actually mean this and am not being sarcastic).

i've been playing online for quite a while and i don't believe that that the game itself is rigged nor that my fav sites ft and ps are up to something.
but these helper applications are like a giant phishing scheme and we are doing it to ourselves by using them.

FWIW, very few 2p2ers use these "helper" applications.

But hell yes we want to know if they are scamming users of their HH files to build their (subscription) database applications.

yeah, i figured but really there wasn't anywhere else i imagined anyone would care about poker software.
it's a bit of a niche concern.
i figured i'd give the program a try cause i was curious. btw: it gives terrible advice and one would be wise not to listen to it's constant instructions to merely "call" or "fold to any bet" when you're J9o, BB and everyone has folded round to you and Sb calls BB. pretty funny

as you said, it's more of the datamining aspect of it which affects all of us online and what it's recording from our sessions. i wouldn't knowingly install a keylogger on my computer nor a backdoor which turns my pc into a zombie.
and that's what i'm worried about here.
i use PT to track MY play but think what you could do with the info if you could add every online player to your database.
though i think PT is more useful for tracking my own play against a particular player and not just some abstract of a previous unencountered player.
i know my play is being tracked by everyone who's got PT or pokerofc i'm up against and that i think is fair. (they're in the game with me and my moves are there for all to see and if one had the time and resources to vet all the hand histories you'd have the same info that Pt gives) but it's why i started using Pt cause i was at a disadvantage against these players and needed to level the field.

BTW: i am continuing to analyze the packet data and will post any results. ominous or benign. i'm positing a theory here and questioning how these things work, which is what i actually do for a living, not trying to start some conspiracy theory. despite the flames and resulting closed thread which my crosspost generated on news/views/gossip i'll continue to post my followup here. so far no one has called me a ****** or questioned my parentage and the replies to my OP have been normal. i think u guys probably have taken my OP in the spirit which it was intended...studied inquisitiveness.

Motto: Don't drink the kool-aid

As I said before, please do post your findings good or bad. Not surprised NVG trolled/locked you - it is not the place for such posts (without concrete proof - even then, BBV / IG would be better) - this is.

I would actually not be surprised if people who could publish such scummy software as poker-crusher are capable of using trojan-like "helper" apps to feed their database. Are you aware if the same people made poker-edge or not?

(btw: was a long and boring process. not fun)

What mutatum solutions has to say about how they get their info for poker crusher.
Q. How is the database maintained?

A. We have a large organized "farm" of computers working for YOU 24 hours a day! These computers are dedicated to collecting hand histories and player betting patterns. These files are processed and the database is updated every 5 minutes.

what the license agreement for holdem genius, texas calculatem and calculatempro have to say about collected data. this is buried in their license agreement in the section on software upgrades. relevant text bolded.

End User agrees: This Software may automatically check for upgrades and improvements while being used online. Also, this Software may connect End User's computer to the Holdem Genius server in order to (1) obtain card location information on the card rooms so auto-read can work, (2) for purposes of software fraud prevention, and (3) to collect data on your opponents. While doing so, it uses the registration code combined with your hard drive ID to log in. Holdem Genius will not collect data on End User's cards.

what's interesting here is that these programs are not data trackers, they're pot odds calculators and action suggesters based on the %'s of pulling a str8, for instance, at different points in the deal. that's all they do and don't need to contact an external server to perform these functions.
so why then are they collecting data on your opponents? they don't give the user access to that information. if they can do this extra stuff, like pokertracker, but don't offer that functionality to the user then WHY are they collecting data at all?

The other interesting thing here is that they state explicitly that they won't collect data on the USERS cards. this is a very clever loophole. because no one can claim that the program they bought is spyware or a trojan because mutatum isn't f'ing you over or sharing YOUR information. but you are being used as a bot for mutatum.

this is fascinating stuff. mutatum has sold the same product under different names, creating a false sense of a competitive market where it is in actuality a monopoly, to thousands of unsuspecting users who are now unwittingly being used as what could reasonably be considered the biggest poker datamining bot-net.

FYI: I did a little experiment with bandwidth. With holdem genius active and showing pot odds and percentages and outs in a live real money game. I started throttling back the bandwidth allowed to holdem genius' internet connection.
immediately, all next hand, pot odds, hand percentages and every other function of HG ceased functioning. the only thing which continued to work was the listing of my hole cards and the hand strength indicator.
so with limited internet access HG can only show you % strength of ones pocket cards. now this is something so simple and so easy to do, that we all know what the hand rank is of pocket whatever without the need for a computer program.
so every other function of HG is based off their server. it's a clever way to keep access to their user-bots because if one didn't allow HG, et al to access their server the entire functionality of the program fails.
so everything this program does is farmed out to their servers. the only thing local is a % chart of hand strengths and the screen capture and reading functionality
open up the bandwidth again and HG is happily providing the additional functions and pushing large amounts of data through the network.

more to come as i learn

this is bad, and i use this for a year
wasted my signup bonus at 888.com
this piss me off.
RIGGED

This is totally false, at least in my case.

I have never used any programs like this and Sharkscope tracked me from the very first SnG I ever played (on both Full Tilt and Ipoker).

I have no idea about the rest of your post but stuff like this tends to push it too far into tin-foil hat territory.

Places like Sharkscope and Official Poker Rankings gather info about stt and mtt results and do not data mine cards and I think likely get these results from the poker sites themselves, you can do it yourself on most sites, just click on any stt or mtt that has finished and you can see who cashed or not and for how much.

As for the rest, software like poker edge have to be getting info about how players play and the board/hole cards data from somewhere and I doubt very much that sites would give it to them (maybe at what price) So at the moment I do not find what BigBlack has to say out of the realm of possibility.

**taking off the foil hat***

well then im glad to hear that it's a coincidence regarding sharkscope. i wasn't trying to finger sharkscope and did say that i can't find any link between them and mutatum solutions.

also that was my initial post and maybe a little scattershot. as i plod along with this isht it all really comes back to mutatum. i'll be setting up for packet sniffing tonight. i've got to establish which is the poker site traffic and eliminate that from the analysis first. so it's all about filters for now until i nail down which traffic goes to mutatum, then we'll pry inside the packets and see whats up.

**sherlock cap goes on**

Do you know if Tournament Indicator is a mutatum product?

BigBlack, the way that these trackers attain all this data is through all the players that subscribe to the program. For example: I purchase poker edge, and then go to full tilt to play. When I join a table, poker edge starts keeping data on how everyone at that table plays. That data gets uploaded to a central data base that everyone---that has purchased poker edge---has access to. That's how they have info on so many people.

PokerTracker does not upload your hand information to a central server. It never has. I don't know where you got that idea from.

BTW Holdem genius has been a horrible experience for me. I paid $99 for the license. It hasn't worked once for me. The program installs fine enough, and I can get it to fire up for my table, but it reads the cards wrong, consequently giving me the wrong advice. The worst part of all this is... their support. Here's a copy of what I've been dealing with
6 days later they finally responded to me... This program must be full of bugs if they can't do anything beyond their 'cut and paste' approach to support. I'm actually going to reconfigure my website to do some serious negative marketing (and I know how to get my website to the top of a google search
: ) if they don't refund me my money s.t.a.t. I'm fed up with them.

My bad if that's not the way the programs work. That was how I had understood it after the research I had done.
I guess I should look into things a little better before spouting off, lol

IF it is sending HHs to their server you can firebomb it with fake HHs to make yourself look like a huge huge fish to other players using this program, unless there's validation/authentication, in which case i'm sure reverse engineering the program to find out what it sends might even reveal a database password....

lol winsocks

Just a thought but from reading posts from here and elsewhere all a lot of people seem to do is data mine constantly, they just open up as many tables as they can and let poker tracker or poker office do the rest.So I guess if your a company that has the resources it could do it on a bigger scale, you only have to collect info on the board cards betting patterns and cards shown down to get a read which is what this newer software claims to do.

I just read the link from the op and they claim to have data on players on 100 sites.So if all they do is so called normal data mine like so many people seem to do, but done on a bigger scale 24/7, then everyone is probably being data mined whether your running any other program or not, then your info is being sold in this other software.

QFT.

I have "fixed" the post you replied to - he was describing the behavior of Poker Edge, certainly not Poker Tracker.

He was correct in his idea, just named the innocent rather than the guilty

couple of responses:

poker tracker does NOT send anything back to anyone.
same goes for poker office, they also do NOT.
(in both of their license agreements they explicitly state that nothing is shared with anyone) haven't gone through all of PT privacy agreements, but poker office also explicitly states that they only contact their server for license verification.
as a control: I ran a sniffer against poker office and can verify that this is true. the only connection it attempts is the initial verification when you start it up. And it's in plain vanilla html. nothing creepy there. in over 12 hours of tracking pokeroffice, it remained silent. so i'm pretty confident that they are on the up and up.
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don't know about Tournament Indicator.
but PokerUsher is definitely another mutatum product.
all of Roy Rounder's stuff is mutatum as well
===========

to hithere: yeah were all being datamined, but for the most part knowingly by each other. my question would be
"how many accounts on how many sites would you have to open in order to mine everyone's data? if you can open anywhere up to 18 tables or so on a particular site with whatever data mining software you're using, just how many accounts would you need to have to accomplish this?"
we all know players who mine multiple tables on multiple sites constantly, and have been doing so for several years. now these are EXTREME mining players and even they don't have the kind of Db's this company are claiming.
and if mutatum are just mining every table on every site (they claim 24/7 and instant access to current stats) then we'd either see at least 1 observer at each table or 1 zombie player seated at each table or there'd be a lot more complaints of bots at the tables) not to mention that many sites will ban outright miners if caught.
so unless they're buying HH from the poker sites, which is implausible, then they're getting the info in a different way.
it's all speculation at this point, but it does seem that it'd be pretty difficult to compile this kind of Db by mining in the way which we as users understand it.
===================

EOM

Update:
there's a hell of a lot of SSL traffic, which is to be expected, between my comp and the poker sites which has to be filtered out. it's taking a while.

there also happens to be a lot of traffic generated by holdem genius.
about 1/4 of the packets during my logging have been from holdem genius which is a lot. it's talking the entire time it's open and i'm seated at a table. but i've got to get into the packets and see whats there once i isolate them from all the other stuff.

trying to filter out the junk for now

on a geek side note:
FT seems to be hosted out of a datacenter in north america on a mohawk indian reservation.