Is something basic like "fold to cbet" considered as "action facing" ? Sounds like it is, tbh in the literal interpretation. But if so, ridiculous.

A fish is a fish. If anyone can't beat the fish at their stakes without something like a NC package then they themselves are a fish and will be beaten up by other regs. That should be pretty obvious.

Then educate - where is the above wrong? how is limiting dynamism by street not what they are doing?

As for NoteCaddy and others like SpinWiz I base what they do on their claims - I suspect though that you are conflating NoteCaddy with my deeper antipathy to add ons and the power of those combined with NoteCaddy with data abuse.

Please, keep depositing.

stars is moving into right direction imo.
BUT, what they also have to do so this has any effect is actually start warning/banning people who continue using banned tools.

Dave, I honestly think that most people just expect they can continue what they are doing and that it will not impact them because they are not in the spotlight.

Initially I thought the new rules were well thought out if they could actually enforce them but as I’ve thought about them more I have my doubts. I feel like Stars decided to do what it wanted to do anyways, but with a cosmetic attempt at covering all of the loopholes brought up in the thread so far. I think that the comprehensiveness of the rules is a welcome step in the right direction, but I think the general enforceability of them and the fact that there are much bigger fish to fry is extremely problematic. Once someone has data it is so difficult to control what they do with it and in my opinion that is the core issue. Some of these restrictions can be bypassed with physical paper, or at worst a second machine. Some of them might be catchable through statistical analysis while others have an impact that cannot be assigned to the banned tool alone (i.e. some tools might help you learn faster, but is that because of the tool or because you studied more off the tables, etc). In addition to that, there are large numbers of bots operating which to me seem like they should be a much higher priority than policing the number of papers people have on their desk, and which is even more nonsensical given that you can still have a HUD which covers the area of a football field! Time and time again we see that rules which are not enforceable change nothing. One only has to look as far as regz.club and its rampant widespread use in the HUSNG community to see an example of this. It’s against the TOS but nearly everyone uses it due to the fact that it’s an open secret that everyone uses it. Sometimes I feel like an idiot for not using it, and I don’t doubt that many people have succumbed to that exact feeling. Making nonsensical and unenforceable rules is worse than nothing as it impacts honest players and opens an opportunity for the unsavoury to gain an advantage.

The core issue here is too much data. It’s too easy to share hand histories and to subscribe to data mining sites or to buy data mined hand histories and at the same time apply this information at the table. A lot of the issues which the new rules try to address would be easily solved by allowing name changes or creating anonymous game play. A powerful HUD is pretty useless if you only have 500 hands on someone and writing hand histories with a delay allows much more effective control of tracking software which mimic prohibited HUD features or tools which otherwise provide an undesirable level of information while in session. This should also include the elimination of the ability of third parties to effectively data mine, which is something that should have been done a long time ago. Make it impossible to rail all but a small subset of games and significantly increase the difficulty of data mining the games which can be viewed. This doesn’t solve the problems of population tendencies built on database sharing (one which I cannot think of a solution for at the moment), but goes a long way in addressing the most critical issues.

One unrelated issue to the data issue is that of reference material. I think that in a perfect world the guidelines as written (and perhaps with some refinement/more examples) could strike a nice balance with allowing some reference material and not letting things get out of hand. However, I think that it’s just so hard and expensive to enforce these rules that it’s not practical. I also think that unless HUDs/tracking software/notes etc are similarly restricted you will see people moving to exploiting those tools to use as reference material. Additionally, there were a couple of issues which I did not find completely clear:
1. the term ‘realistically referenced in hard copy’ needs to be defined properly as I would argue that both of the failing examples could easily be placed on my desk and used. If there is some criteria for this term, then it should be clearly defined. There are pictures of Pokerstars pros with dozens of charts taped to their desk and walls so the term as phrased fails the empirical test already.
2. It’s not 100% clear whether the totality of reference material which can be used is equal or less than one A4 sheet or if each piece of reference material must be equal or less than one A4 sheet (although given the communication in this thread, I lean towards the former)
3. I think some more examples are necessary - i.e. are the Tipton ranges allowed? If not what subset of them are? Can you use the Nash push/fold charts at the same time as well? Given that many people use those specific ranges, I think that it’s important to make a clear, consistent ruling on them and make it available to all. I’m sure there are standard 6 max and spins ranges which should also be covered.
4. “simply comprehensive enough to result in otherwise unrelated players playing in a very similar fashion”: This is contradictory as well as if I chose to play nash push/fold for HUSNG then the charts would not be allowed under this, but yet are clearly allowed in the examples.

There are some nice properties of these rules that it may make it harder for bots to operate since now they not only have to pass a playing test, but satisfactorily demonstrate that they know their preflop strategy off by heart rather than just provide the reference material which they use (though the cost of testing may be quite high). However, beyond this, there are some alarming issues which will allow players to continue using banned reference material (less so in the case of being allowed more than one A4 sheet) and put honest players at a disadvantage:
1. Many individual players will continue using their sophisticated chart setups as their strategy will be unique to them and enforcement for individual accounts is much more difficult
2. Using more reference material than is allowed, but little enough that they could likely pass a playing test
3. Continue using reference material as a baseline and deviating frequently enough based on opponent tendencies to make it undetectable
4. Periodically modify reference material either through refinement or just make changes which have little impact on EV to make it impossible to detect reference material use from play alone

Let’s consider that the typical Pokerstars investigation consists of the player making a video for 1 hour and that for a HUSNG player this will consist of 25-35 tournaments or roughly 300-400 hands. Apart from blundering a hand which you normally play with a pure strategy, there is absolutely no way to tell if a hand with a mixed strategy is played differently to normal. A player could have their pure strategies written on the allowed reference material (or indeed, memorised) and then use extra, illegal, charts for the difficult to remember mixed hands while playing. It doesn’t matter what they do during their playing review as the sample is too small to tell. I admit I don’t know the effectiveness of timing and mouse click analysis during these reviews, so I may not be painting a fair picture, but I do think that scenario presents a very large problem.

Moving on to the HUDs and tracking software changes. We’ve got large PLO bot rings and now we’re being told that monitoring the number of colours in your HUD stats is a priority. I think the rules as they are have a few issues and need some work. There is a key issue for me with these rules: “There are virtually no restrictions to what the tracking applications can do with the data in terms of what, how and when data is displayed, providing: the tracking application is not used to merely mimic the features of an otherwise prohibited HUD“:
1. Does this mean that the queries/reports which can be run against a tracker database will be significantly limited whilst the client is open? Will Pokertracker and Holdemmanager be required to restrict these functions accordingly? Is it wise that players can run queries on a second device with impunity while honest players will be restricted?
2. Does this mean that note writing software like Notecaddy cannot create notes which break down information by hole/board cards? Subsequently, does this mean that there is a restriction on manual notes of the same nature? If these are not aligned, how will the difference be accounted for and policed?
3. This potentially creates a huge disconnect between HUDs, tracking software reports, and reference material which encourages loopholes. Can I create notes for my preflop strategy vs a player based on my tracking software database? Can notes contain cowsay representations of multiple statistics - i.e. scatterplots? Can I print out reports on my opponents between sessions which contain representations prohibited by HUDs?
4. ‘invisible’ colouring issues brought up by dave, the ability to manipulate visibility by multiplying by 0 or 1 and the reordering/movement of statistics seem to be left unaddressed.
5. The combing of single data point graphics in clever ways and use of unlimited popups.

Lastly, moving on to the hand and situation analysers. As you might guess, I think it’s nuts trying to direct what you can and cannot do with a hand history once you have it. The inconsistency here is stunning. I just cannot comprehend why it’s ok to have 1000s of statistics, but something telling you that you did not have enough equity to call in the previous hand is banned. The worst part is that many of the tools like this have so little impact on future hands, that I cannot think of a detectable change in outcome which they would create. I think there really should be two categories here: analysers which analyse the situation and ones which analyse what happened in the specific hand. I say this because in a tournament situation, analysing the situation could provide quite a bit of advice moving forward for immediate future hands and this could possibly be detected through outcomes. However, given I hear rumours that people use scripts that pull in stack sizes, ranges (possibly opponent specific, i’m not sure), and payouts and run them through icmizer automatically I’m not holding my breath on them catching a harder to detect form. The second form, of hand specific analysers are really unlikely to have much of an impact within a single playing session. The situations they analyse are so specific that I would argue that their impact on future hands is very low. It’s not going to affect the edge one person has vs another within a session and it has no detectable outcome so I think that it shouldn’t be an issue and is certainly going to lead to negatively impacting honest players.

Addressing the data mining issue should be the number one priority in my opinion. A lot of these issues will be solved by that alone. I think that policing non outcome based actions is completely nonsensical as it’s beyond detection and just makes it more difficult for those of us who are honest. The problems facing online poker are only going to get worse and any distractions from addressing them are only going to make them worse.

I've deposited twice in my life. Once was a $45 deposit many years ago and the only other time was when FTP shutdown and I had to deposit some funds on another site as mine were stuck there.

You're just making yourself look silly now to be honest.

I don't agree that datamining is so big problem. Everyone can subscribe to some hh provider.

It will be much more worse if, for example, 10% could use data mining and others 90% not. It causes very significant unfair advantage among different players. It will cause a chaos.

Actually, purchased hand history is not effective against fish, because:

1. 99% of fish plays not many hands, so you don't have enough sample.

2. Most fish actually don't know how to play and therefore play quite randomly depending on their current feeling. The difference is higher on the longer periods like weeks or months.

3. 99% of fish have significant and obvious leaks which are far more profitable for regs than those you can figure out from stats.

It become really effective only against others regs. Now at least you are sure that your opponents have full sample on you so as you on them.

All you need to do is be prepared to breach the current (shown below) and future TOS

"5.4. EXTERNAL PLAYER ASSISTANCE PROGRAMS (EPA). PokerStars prohibits those External Player Assistance Programs ("EPA Programs") which are designed to provide an "Unfair Advantage" to players. PokerStars defines "External" to mean computer software (other than the Software), and non-software-based databases or profiles (e.g. web sites and subscription services). PokerStars defines an "Unfair Advantage" as any instance in which a User accesses or compiles information on other players beyond that which the User has personally observed through the User's own game play. We encourage you to read our Prohibited Online Software FAQ."

I don't agree that access is a valid metric for whether something should be ok or not. That being said, what percentage of Pokerstars players do you think use datamined hand histories? I'd take the under on 10%.

I also disagree that it doesn't affect fish:

1. You don't need to have access to many hands to improve your strategy vs a fish. Knowing whether someone 3bets 10% or 30% or MR 40% or 60% can lead to significant improvements in EV and preflop statistics can be quite useful with very few hands.

2. Again, the stats don't have to be always right, but having some information should improve your EV over having no information on average. This EV is directly taken out of the pockets of the fish you are playing with.

3. While this may be true, adjustments made the first time you play a fish, or even increasing your sample to give you a better idea of whether you should call or fold are enough to give you a significant gain in EV that you wouldn't have with datamined data.

I am not saying it doesn't affect fish at all. I sad datamining is not effective. Your gain is too small. In real world you need just 20-30 hands or few showdowns to determine that fish 3bets 30%. But you need much more sample to detect if fish 3bets 10% or 15%. But once you get those sample it does not give you significant advantage comparing with your total win rate against that fish, just because he 3bets 15 and limps 40

I am not saying dataming is not a problem. I am saying datamining is not a number one problem. )

I agree that it cannot be the sole metric (I am against datamining), but I would argue that something not being available to all makes it something which is presumptively unfair - and with a significant hurdle to show that it was not, in fact, unfair (IMO if a piece of software which can inform strategy in any way whatsoever is not publicly available, it should be banned). It is the single most important factor.

I also don't see the concerns with enforceability. If a piece of software which has a negative impact on the game is banned, even if the deterrent only causes 10% of users to stop using it, that is a good reason to ban it IMO.

Datamining is by far the number 1 problem, and it's also easiest to solve on Stars' end (compared to drawing a line somewhere for allowed software and enforcing it).

If fish play a large enough sample, particularly in fast action games such as 6max hypers, hu hypers and spin and goes- it goes a long way. I agree that a small number of hhs on a competent opponent probably won't be of much use as many spots are "standard for regs" shallow.

A lot of fish have small samples yes- but if you know on the outset that a fish has 60% vpip on sb vs button minraise, and another has 20% vpip- your button strategy can be adapted to gain a lot of EV compared to readless. And vpip stats converge very quickly over small samples.

As for reg vs reg- ofc most of their preflop stats are going to be similar, and they won't make huge blunders like fish- but with huge samples you can learn a lot from just e.g. looking at the hhs top regs in the stake. For husngs and regzclub- you can look up the hhs of whoever is battling you and gain a huge unfair/illegal advantage.

That is good for whom? The cheaters? If everything is allowed then fish feel overwhelmed. If there is rampant cheating, unless stars employs good pr and practices censorship- the negative impact overweighs the positive.

Idk if i should out anyone- but there are many accounts that have long been suspected of being bots on stars playing hu hypers, if not at least using software aids. Only skier's group have been singled out due to the uproar caused by 100s+ regs.

There are an awful lot of people doing it for it not to be effective..

I think we have very different definitions of unfair. I think that something which everyone has the same opportunity to build is fair. Do you expect everyone to make their HUDs publicly available? How about their preflop strategies? There are plenty of things people build for themselves or keep private in Poker. On top of that, the software which caused all of this uproar itself is not particularly useful without good data to go with it. Do you expect every one of your opponents to hand you detailed strategic information? Seems that would defeat the purpose of poker a bit.

I think it's debatable if reducing the use of something is a net positive - especially when we are talking about the difference between a couple pieces of paper. Even the more sophisticated stuff is not entirely clear to me. If Pokerstars announces changes which still leads to rampant use, is that fair? It's not fair to the honest players who are now at a disadvantage (which I would argue are more likely to be recreational players) and it's also not fair to players who are not 'in the know' as they are likely to take the rules at face value with very little idea that they bear very little resemblance to the reality of the situation. These players are essentially being conned by the appearance of a much different reality.

So let's say we believe that people using software X gain an unfair advantage. If 10% of those people stop using software X, then the total number of players in the pool with the unfair advantage reduces, so the net amount of unfair activity reduces.

I think it would be much better if everyone's HUD was available for a price, but I'm less concerned because making a HUD doesn't require a skill - computer programming - entirely extraneous to poker and which has no reason to provide an advantage.

It's also somewhat fallacious to say 'it's still not fair' as a reason for not banning particular software deemed to be unfair (I don't wish to debate which software is and is not unfair at this point), since, as mentioned above, those who didn't use the software all along will notice a net reduction in people using unfair software against them.

I should note that you're likely to see things through the scope of HUSNGs and I'm coming at things from the perspective of a 6m zoom player, where there's much less of a defined 'correct' way to play, so a winning player providing their strat is more harmful to the games (and indeed, game quality has increased recently since a few bots were banned).

I'd look at it another way

If we're considering software that's currently legal then I'd say it's more a case of people using software x gain an advantage. If even 90% of those people stop using software x when it's banned then the number of people with an unfair advantage has now increased.

I think that's an important distinction.

I think you're being a bit quick to assume the use of Pokertracker/other tracking software, SQL, statistical analysis, and visualization techniques as less extraneous to poker than writing software. There is plenty of disparity in the ability of players to use these tools which are not correlated with poker skill. The fundamental point is that all of these things are extraneous to the game of poker and you don't like the ones you are not familiar with and, more appallingly, expect access to the hard work of everyone else.

Further, no software is inherently unfair. It's a subjective decision generally governed by the rules. As Husker pointed out, making a rule where a large number of people continue as before will actually increase the amount of unfair activity. Even if you say activity X is harmful and want to reduce that activity, empirical evidence suggests that even if you manage a short term reduction, more and more people will take advantage as they realize activity x goes on. This harms the uninformed (or honest) players as they will not know to partake and at the same time essentially cons them. At least if something is explicitly allowed, everyone is on the same page and not only have the same opportunity to create that same advantage but know what they are facing.

6max cash is very different I guess- you can have a variety of preflop strategies, and make a lot of adjustments vs opponents (e.g. when there are 2 fish in the blinds). Preflop isn't even that important.

With something like HU hypers- ppl are using much more specific preflop charts for a long time. So it's not so much a hud, as a pre-computed strategy. How do you ban that, and why should someone who spent time working on it be forced to sell it for the sake of fairness? Of course- if said strategy is really good- then it will give an unfair advantage. Otherwise no one would care. Bots have been in poker a long time ago- but they were terrible so no one cared.

I think multiple things are being discussed simultaneously. Anyway- I'm not entirely sure what stars meant with their pdf file, or where they are heading towards. Personally I don't mind the banning of all huds just to get rid of the confusion.

The problem with enforcement is my chief concern too. The rules were unclear in the past. Now they are a complete shambles.
I read and re-read the PDF, but I still don't know if my pre-flop hand charts or my Notecaddy popups are now illegal. And I'm pretty worried that people using "unknown" software will still have access to powerful data long after the HEM/PT/NC company has gone busto.

Can someone at Stars just make an executive decision and ban all software aids? You know it makes sense.

Ban everything BUT the stars client.... Ez decision, IMO. I mean you can't use anything at a live poker table, why should it be any different?

Reduce it to a single table as well? I mean you only play 1 table live...

I'd actually be OK with that as well.

And I was talking just about software, guess you were to busy being a wise ass to see that......

Any 'you don't get this in live poker' arguments are pointless. The games are different in various ways and have been from pretty much the start. In this case you want to rule out the thing you obviously don't get in live poker (software) while ignoring all the other areas where there are differences. If you don't want software then fine just say that, but don't claim it's because you don't get it in live poker. Also, if I was being really pedantic I'd point out that you can't actually play poker online without software...