I mean any argument individually might be true or might not be true, but it's hard to take it from someone that absolutely needs them to be true for their own interest.

It is both. A poker site is like a business where thousands of random computers are connecting to its network. No security team could ever guarantee that every computer that connects to the network is not infected. No amount of regulation can ensure that either.

That is why it is important to have hand histories. The more eye balls that you have the more protected a site becomes and the quicker that those that slip through can be identified and removed.

Maybe a better analogy would be asking the police to enforce the law for an entire population without any reports from its citizens. Sure it's important that the police are doing a good job and have enough resources but no amount of resources can equate to having every law abiding citizen looking out for each other and reporting to the police.

Please name me one benefit of not writing hand histories. (Make sure that you read the OP) There are none.

-Derek

The issue as it currently stands is that we cannot differentiate a normal hand history from a hand history that is written by a third party hand grabber.

We are currently working with one large, forward thinking and innovative site to cryptographically sign hand histories and we welcome every other site to do the same. With a cryptographically signed hand history, the site signs the hand history with a private key. The signature can then be verified with a public key that everyone has access to. This provides two benefits:

1. We can ensure that the hand history was generated by the site.
2. We can ensure that the hand history has not been modified.

Once a site begins signing hand histories then we will only allow import of those hand histories that are signed and pass signature validation. This is the same cryptography that is used to protect the internet.

While we currently are working with one forward thinking and innovative site, we are hoping that eventually every site will implement this solution.

-Derek

Stables and winnings regs in general not being able to group together and mass huge amounts of data on the population tendencies giving them an unfair advantage.

I agree about hand histories: those are necessary for purposes like verifying if money was split correctly and to keep your own records for accounting/tax purposes.
I strongly disagree about HUDs though. Recreational players, at least those I had a chance to talk to feel very strongly those give unfair advantage. I don't play poker professionally anymore but if I were ever to play a game for fun I would choose a site which bans HUDs. A recreational player wants a fair chance without spending tons of time setting the tools up. The line between HUDs, advisers or straight up bots is completely arbitrary. No one cares if you are the one doing the clicking, if the advice comes from processing a huge database or running a solver or w/e. What people care about is being against you and your brain only. If you are better at the game - fair but at least they have a shot that you slip, forget, make a wrong read - something that is greatly diminished if you have software helping with those unlike your recreational opponents.

If I play golf or tennis or chess against superior players I want them to beat me with the same equipment starting from equal position. I think this sentiment is shared very widely across recreational player base and I applaud sites trying to do something about it even if it's a decade too late.

I think people who defend HUDs hurt credibility of argument against banning hand histories as it's easy for a recreational player to think: "oh, those are the same predatory grinders who want their bots/HUDs to be allowed, if they want that, it's certainly against my interests".

Posting on two different accounts in this thread without making sure people understand that you have a financial interest in tracking software working at PP is somewhere between deceptive and unethical.

I agree with everything you say. Just funny it comes from the man who created pio solver and created the biggest gap between recreational and professional players in the history of poker. Its not a surprise you don't play poker professionally anymore the millions you made from pio will keep you out of the 50nl streets for a while.

Kelvis, I get that every single post of yours comes from a place of anger and bitterness, and in a way that gives you your own kind of charm, but often times you have little idea of how segments of this industry operate as a result of your anger driven agenda.

This change is seen negatively by most backers and stables, because the hand histories are the best means to analyze how a player is playing and also confirm that the presented results are accurate as well.

No backers that I know of create shared databases of hands, because the risk of this is massive compared to the benefit, and as much as you and others think that stables are comprised of a ton of people who actively work with each other, the reality is that individual poker players are individual, and they are correctly concerned with how they do as an individual.

Does that mean all stables are pure and innocent as the driven snow? Hardly. Some are well known to ghost their players (and looking at hand histories of players from these groups shows a dramatic difference in play at different points in a long tournament). Others have insane clauses in their contracts that many players cluelessly ignore as they sign, and only learn about them when they appear in the neg feedback thread for not paying back a ton of money they would not owe if they had signed with other groups.

In the end, this change is a change, and having dealt with Party Poker a lot over many, many years I can say that at times they had people who knew what was going on, and other times they literally had no clue what was going on. Guess we will see on this one, but this change offers some potential benefits and drawbacks. I would take Sect's side on his wager if he did it (he will not obviously), but fortunately most people who do what he suggested do it in a manner which is much easier caught.

Also, OP clearly has an pro HH agenda (because, duh), but I choose to ignore that and essentially the OP itself, as this is a valid topic for debate, and someone else would have started it otherwise who does not create software that relies upon saved hand histories.

it doesnt hurt the argument. its their own shortcomings, if they cant distinguish the facts and only see whos saying them (kind of like the op in this thread). facts are facts. hand histories save lives. the argument doesnt need credible voices, only facts.

huds are like abortions, yea its murder, but people are gonna do it anyway, might as well make it legal and safe/fair for everyone

you cant stop huds, all these changes do is make eastern euro regs stronger and some western regs too. it creates a false sense of security built on lies, and adds major security/bot/collusion issues.

yea this thread was started by the wrong person, this discussion was already going strong in the party poker big changes thread. this is a real issue, not just for the guy who owns pt4. maybe combine the threads and add a suffix to the main thread title about hand histories?

I remember that BitB guy saying explicitly they have a data analyst that uses all the hands to get population reads and share those with every member. He flatout admitted it.

This. So much this.

Some of you people cheering `hey finally no HUD for everyone, now i finally will crush those cheating bastards` have no clue that there is no way to stop smart cheaters from having unfair advantage (before, it was available for everyone).
There are ways u can collect data and have working `HUDs` w/o HH being available for everyone.
People who make money of such cheating, dont compare on the same level to lol partypoker programmers. Sure they will ban all crushing bots.
People who suggest PP to get rid of huds dont even play on that site serious volumes. Im sure a guy like Trueteller that they signed was supporting such change (dude doesnt care about HUDs cose dooh).

jokes on you, good luck on the tables.

Perfect! Actually, I have written an article in 2015 or 2016 suggesting something like this is coming in the future. Somehow integrate the tracker and client so the trackers can be allowed, but the site will have controll over which HHs are imported or which HUD functions will be allowed and which not. The recs just dont want to play against people using massive databases and having acces to tens or even hundreds of stats real time... its not fun and even feels like cheating to them.

Not for FF, SnGs, MTTs etc...

+1

It is very different, in chess I have no problem if my opponent studies with a super computer, if he can remember its advice and use it, then good for him. But he cant have any assistance during the game. And the recs want exactly the same for poker. Study any way you want, but play using solely your brain and memory.

Feel free to post the specifics of what you are talking about, because I would regard general "population reads" (whatever that means) as something quite a bit different than giving every backed players hands to the others in the stable so that they have better HUD data on their specific opponents.

I am a backer, and I talk to a lot of other backers. Most hate this change, and they aint good enough actors to be secretly hiding their motivations. I understand where your angry takes comes from, but it is not accurate with regard to the backing industry in general, even if you have an at best partially related second hand bits of misrepresented information.

Both against the rules. You are not allowed to pool the databases and analyse them even if you only provide some general/populational advice afterwards.

People had private solvers like Pio prior to its release, so he actually narrowed the gap a little bit.

This is called datamining and as was indicated in the OP was agreed is not good for the games. Not writing hand histories has no bearing on datamining. Datamined hands do not use hand histories written by the site. They are generated using other techniques.

Please see this post for what we are attempting to do to stop datamining.

-Derek

How to become a poker player. Step one buy huds and scripts and hand history's .

Step two get a list of whales

Step 3 bum hunt like your life depended on it.

Step 4 instantly sit out when whale leaves or go's broke

Step 5 cry about how bad a poker site is when they stop you leaching of there site and bum hunting.

HUD's should have never been allowed in the first place but they were because of greed.

This post says it all . Now only cheats will gain a edge lol.

Can anyone shed light how easy or hard this is to circumvent?

I find it super weird, that StatName tracks Prima with precision, even though they don't offer HHs to players themselves anymore.

Party doesn't support railing tables anymore, so I guess observer datamining is out of question now. But just how easy it is to use construct HHs via screenscraping from the table you're playing?

I believe that observing was disable because some seating scripts were trying to find tables with good vpip/pfr ratio. I might be wrong on that though.

Screen scraping - sites are fighting this with some interesting stuff. For example pixels randomly move and change color in a way that human eye cannot see the changes, but it makes the screescrapers job much more difficult and resource intensive. There are many methods for both the scrapers and anti-scrapers and in the end its all about who wants to invest more money and time into it.

It won't be hard at all to construct HHs from hands that you've played yourself: fundamentally, the server has to send the data to your computer, and it's got to be visible to you. Anything that is visible to you, as the user, is also going to be visible to your computer, obviously, because that's where it is being displayed.

It is less likely that a dataminer would use screen scraping, specifically, but rather, they're more likely to directly hook into the background process of the PartyPoker software. Eg, when you're dealt the Eight of Hearts, the PartyPoker server obviously doesn't send your computer a picture of the Eight of Hearts, but rather, they send a message to your computer, "display Eight of Hearts in Seat X". The dataminer will be able to see that underlying message.


(Yes, this is obviously a simplification)

Yeah, thats the other method, I believe that its called "data stream method". This was one of the ways to get around the anon tables on some sites as the server sent non-anonymised data and only the HHs were anonymised. But i believe there is some kind of protection right now - the data from server are encrypted and are decrypted in the klient, so its not easy to read them in between.

I was recently working on an article about poker bots so I have some vague knowledge of how these things works, but feel free to correct me or add more details.

People should report those who violate the rules if they have the evidence to back up that claim. That should always be the case, as it is for the better of the general poker economy.

I agree but why do you say it to me? Author of the post I replyed to seemed to think it is legal to analyse mass databases and its only illegal to share the hands for playing purposes. Both are TOS violation in fact as you are not allowed to share the HHs data, they are solely for your personal use. But you cant really prove somethng like this happens so the sites just dont enforce these rules...

https://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/s...0&postcount=30

Oh and it's not questionable or a grey area; it's cheating.