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Data Mining Sites and ACR/BCP/WPN Data Mining Sites and ACR/BCP/WPN

09-30-2024 , 09:42 PM
How are data mining sites getting hand history coverage for the WPN network?

This seems shady as hell considering you can't see the cards without sitting in or using up "rail" tickets. In my opinion this warrants some discussion / investigation. It's also suspicious that a lot of these sites have Russian / Eastern Euro ties (which is where a lot of the botting activity originates from ...)

The most obvious answers I can think of are:

- Tons of fake accounts and data scraping the tables
- Bots gathering the hand histories in their database as they play
- Directly from WPN ( probably not ... but given their reputation ... maybe )
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09-30-2024 , 10:00 PM
accounts managed by the data mining operation or 3rd party accounts give them their hand histories
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10-02-2024 , 02:44 PM
i assume spectator accounts
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10-02-2024 , 05:51 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by aner0
i assume spectator accounts
That is my main assumption. However, interestingly at least one site is offering WPN hand histories for 200z ... which doesn't have a spectator option. 25z wasn't an option strangely.

Quote:
Originally Posted by damian^
accounts managed by the data mining operation or 3rd party accounts give them their hand histories
Care to elaborate on that? I assume you mean "spectator accounts" by "accounts managed by the data mining operation" and by 3rd parties you're referring to players selling HHs or a 3rd party data collector (non-player).

Is this something you have detailed knowledge on?
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10-02-2024 , 06:11 PM
Some of the bots/RTA stuff I looked into had a central server that you upload hands to after/during a session. I doubt though they would be contributing these to a public database as they are much more valuable I presume in keeping their own systems ahead in private so it seems unlikely they are contributing to theses services. Even if the conflict of interest isn't that high, it doesn't feel like these sites are making enough for them to be bothered with it as a revenue stream. I might be way off on that last part.
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10-02-2024 , 07:28 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by ten25
That is my main assumption. However, interestingly at least one site is offering WPN hand histories for 200z ... which doesn't have a spectator option. 25z wasn't an option strangely.



Care to elaborate on that? I assume you mean "spectator accounts" by "accounts managed by the data mining operation" and by 3rd parties you're referring to players selling HHs or a 3rd party data collector (non-player).

Is this something you have detailed knowledge on?
no just guessing but i used to run an email marketing operation and one of my expenses was sending emails to a list hygiene service that scrubs email lists of bots, traps and the like...

obviously gmail and hotmail wouldnt willingly give up their own accounts to the list hygiene companies because its a conflict of interest but this whole ordeal seems similar. The only place they can get bots is by research, data analysis or buying confirmed traps from other email marketers.

so a company that needs info like this typically only has a limited amount of ways of getting hand histories and thats by using their own accounts or buying hand histories from groups or stables or wherever they can (3rd parties). For a programmer, i doubt this is very difficult to do and all it takes is setting up fake account and buying hand histories. Just those two options alone would give them a lot of data to sift through.
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10-02-2024 , 07:51 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by damian^
For a programmer, i doubt this is very difficult to do and all it takes is setting up fake account and buying hand histories. Just those two options alone would give them a lot of data to sift through.
As someone with some programming knowledge, and experience scraping data, it actually would be quite a bit of work to constantly create/maintain enough spectator accounts and cycle through them properly with the spectator time limits WPN has set. Especially if WPN is banning these possible "spectator accounts" on a regular basis (who knows if they are). My assumption is this would all be automated, but it isn't a small amount of work to get that in place. Despite the amount of work and ongoing maintenance it would take to achieve this, it's very possible.

The weirdest part about this is how are they getting 200z coverage? There is no observer mode for 200z.

Maybe if there are players that show up often enough in the data - that could be a clue the data comes from those players - but it could also just mean they put in lots of 200z volume. Haven't thought too deeply about whether there would be a way to discern which of these things is happening (if you had the hand histories).
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10-02-2024 , 08:32 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by ten25
As someone with some programming knowledge, and experience scraping data, it actually would be quite a bit of work to constantly create/maintain enough spectator accounts and cycle through them properly with the spectator time limits WPN has set. Especially if WPN is banning these possible "spectator accounts" on a regular basis (who knows if they are). My assumption is this would all be automated, but it isn't a small amount of work to get that in place. Despite the amount of work and ongoing maintenance it would take to achieve this, it's very possible.

The weirdest part about this is how are they getting 200z coverage? There is no observer mode for 200z.

Maybe if there are players that show up often enough in the data - that could be a clue the data comes from those players - but it could also just mean they put in lots of 200z volume. Haven't thought too deeply about whether there would be a way to discern which of these things is happening (if you had the hand histories).
Forgot to mention, you would need many computers and/or virtual machines to get full coverage - especially when you consider all the other sites they have aside from WPN.
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10-02-2024 , 11:23 PM
maybe they just have a limited amount of data to sell to poker players for WPN and their product is better suited for players wanting to study pools from other sites like GG or pokerstars. (again similar to my email marketing comparison...the list hygiene company would say ya we can clean hotmail accounts but its not our best product however we are much better at cleaning gmail/yahoo email lists)

as a poker player it would also help to keep this in mind and not trust data mining operations that guarantee something crazy like 100% coverage for every pool for all stakes...but if their transparent and say something like "yah we usually just offer data on stakes "200NL through 500NL, we dont have much data on $1k NL and up" then you can usually tell if its worth buying their data product

Talking to them about this would offer some insight into their business practices

Last edited by damian^; 10-02-2024 at 11:31 PM.
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10-03-2024 , 02:20 PM
OP, do you have a genuine interest in datamined hands, or are you just clutching your pearls because "CH34T1NG!!!1!"?
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10-03-2024 , 06:13 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by AlanBostick
OP, do you have a genuine interest in datamined hands, or are you just clutching your pearls because "CH34T1NG!!!1!"?
Multiple HH data mining sites seem to have good coverage (based on # of hands available per month/year) for most sites.

In WPNs case, a spectator account has 3 tickets which last for 5 hours. Every 24 hours you get 3 more tickets. That means just to cover 3 tables around the clock, you'd need 5 accounts. All stakes on WPN are covered, plus they're covering MTTs too. Not to mention the 200z coverage - which doesn't allow spectators.

Covering WPN would require a lot of computing resources. Other sites would require less resources, but it would still be substantial on sites with higher volume.

The question I have is who is buying enough hand histories to make expending such a large amount of resources worth it? The answer to that question could be interesting ... I'm guessing it's mostly bot operators who would buy the histories, maybe a few human players or stables.

Of course this is assuming the companies aren't getting the hand histories without scraping.
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10-03-2024 , 08:17 PM
One data mining site also tracks iPoker (with bad coverage) which does not have rail tickets, you need to play the table to see the nicknames. So they def have some sus approach

My best guess was that some third party software is selling data of their customers. E.g. trackers or table helper software
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10-03-2024 , 09:00 PM
Does anyone know how sharkscope gets their data? They sell it, so they must pay for it? They have some kind of deal with the sites?
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10-04-2024 , 12:30 AM
Quote:
Originally Posted by RyanWCollins
One data mining site also tracks iPoker (with bad coverage) which does not have rail tickets, you need to play the table to see the nicknames. So they def have some sus approach

My best guess was that some third party software is selling data of their customers. E.g. trackers or table helper software
Interesting about iPoker. I am in the US so haven't played there.

3rd party tools doing tracking behind the scenes isn't something I considered. That would actually be a much easier way to get the data, considering the HH files are saved right on the PC ... no visual scraping necessary in many cases. No need for any major resources.

Several popular table helpers and hand history converters fit the bill ... all of which seem to have Russian/Eastern Euro ties (sold on Russian web sites). Not to mention HUD programs. Obviously any of these programs sending hand histories out would be a huge scandal to say the least, especially if players non-showdown hole cards are shared (whether that is scrubbed from the data which is publicly sold or not).

Quote:
Originally Posted by cold chillin
Does anyone know how sharkscope gets their data? They sell it, so they must pay for it? They have some kind of deal with the sites?
I am pretty sure Sharkscope has some kind of opt-in set up with PokerStars - where you have to tell Stars you want to allow them to make your results public, but it seems they are tracking it whether you opt in or not ... it's just that your full data isn't viewable unless you opt in. I can't remember exactly how it works though, it was forever ago when I set it up. Not sure about other sites.
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11-04-2024 , 09:53 PM
I asked h2n in the past if there is any way they can see our hhs and they said no. I guess you have to take their word for it

Table helpers make sense but the majority arent russian if i know correctly. Intuitive, jurojin, stackntile arent but i might be wrong

In Wpn or ipoker, they can easily have an employee who sends hhs to them for a fee
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11-05-2024 , 12:50 AM
From what I have heard, most of the more recent MS-HS+ tracked hands on both WPN and ipoker are incomplete in the sense that they only capture a fraction of the hands being played.

I personally think this warrants further investigation into the softwares that are commonly used during the grind, from trackers (HM3, H2N, PT4 etc.) to 3rd party assistance (captions, Juro, intuitive tables etc.). This should be doubly so for any software which has an function of "sending error reports" back to the developers (e.g. HM3 request permission from users to send error reports to developers).

Hopefully some participants on 2p2 that has a experienced programming background can look into it for the rest of us and share the results with the rest of us. Much thanks in advance.
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