TLDR: A recreational losing player would like having PTR up and running again. It was fun and it makes him feel more safe playing online. We players should insist that everything is transparent and that we can see all the hands online on some site. PTR was good for poker!


I was/am a losing player but I always liked to look at graphs on PTR, seeing people arguing on PTR, calling each other donk, nit, hit&runners etc.. Yeah, my graph looked very bad but I was still playing and it was fun chasing different badges and arguing (trolling) with people, reading comments etc.

It also made me feel more safe playing online, because there were many people who used PTR to catch Chinese DoN SNG ring, to catch shortstack colluders and softplay between Stoxtrader and his buddies.https://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/1...-tl-dr-757267/

Now poker sites don't show your name and and I refuse to play online because there is no transparency and I don't know if there is a collusion ring ran by some rogue employees. If AbsolutePoker/UB had anonymized names, then we would never know about the cheating that was going on. In a casino everyone can see if you are winning or losing, but these players still come there to play because it is fun. All my friends who are losing players said that it was more fun back in the days, and they miss PTR. They all think that sites are rigged, and that there is a collusion even when there is no foul play. Having PTR and independent people who could investigate the sites and players would make them feel that it is ok to play online. It is not only important that sites are honest, it is important that fish have a feeling that sites are honest. You all know how many threads about rigged sites there are.

Sharskope helps a bit, but some sites do not allow them to show all the data so it is harder to catch another Chinese DoN SNG ring or something like that. In a casino or WSOP we can see the list of people and who won what. The same should be for poker sites so that it is easier for us to catch colluders. Also there are no comments below graphs so it is less social than PTR.

I will never play on anomymized tables because I don't want to experience something like AP/UB scandal.

If you want more fish online, make everything transparent and let the fish have fun. Let them send you a message that you should not bet kk into trup qq! It was fun back in the days when they could write that down on PTR.
Also everyone can see that they lose when they play in a casino but they still come because they don't feel cheated and it is more fun.

What was the reason they got rid of PTR? I agree, it needs to be re-instated. Or some other cash game tracking site needs to be available.


Sharkscope should also show everyone's results. This would stop losing MTT players being able to sell shares at markup, and effectively "scam" or "dupe" the average joe into making -EV investments.

For example, if you want to buy shares in one of the big Twitch streamers like Jaime Staples or Lex Veldhuis, you have no way of knowing if they're winning or not (afaik they're not winning, but the average joe who stumbles across their streams has no way of knowing that). If lifetime profit results were totally transparent, it would prevent all this from happening.

I also think tracking results, leaderboards, HighStakes DB was good for online poker. But I think PTR selled handhistories and that was clearly a big negative.

But publicity of results, sharkscope leaderboards, the thread of HighStakes here in 2+2 are great things, but pokersites don't know how to promote the game. The high stakes allstars was a good initiative for example of some things they could do.

Anonymizing players is the best recipe to kill online poker, nobody with a sane mind will play in those garbage sites where there is no possible way to track anybody and know what's going on.
Also poker is about knowing your opponent styles, anonymizing player names only attract a new wave of GTO BOTS that can't be detected by any player.

That was the weird thing about PTR, most people seemed to like it. I personally thought it was a bad idea for the fish to have their losses published but even my friends who played casually and were losing players got a kick out of it which was extremely counter-intuitive to me.

I was losing badly back then, but I liked PTR, and I liked going to a casino where everyone could see that I was losing but it was fun. I liked looking at the graphs of high-stakes players, and imagining how it would be like to have the swings like that. The fact that there would be independent people like Noah looking at the fairness of the game is just an another good thing.

As the recent poker cheating scandal showed, we definitely need something like SharkScope and PokerTableRatings. A great bunch of cheating instances were uncovered by players because of these sites. And it was fun to look at the sites, it was good for the game. I don't know a single losing player who didn't like those sites. It was fun to look at the hands and charts of mega whales and huge winners.

Why did sites like PokerStars start disallowing hand mining? It should be public for everyone, and the sites themselves should be more transparent about their business.

well there are still tracking sites like SN & SH but one of the issues is that they dont track zoom/rush games so basically a cheater can do all they want there

Completely agree. Everything should be tracked.

yeah we need to get rid of this gg poker cheating ecology team, no offence jason koon ect but you all to rich to care, we need some guys who actually cares about the state of online poker, idk how this would work, but **** this gg cheating councel imo

bring back PTR and SS and allow all data of zoom games to be available, transparency is the only way imo

Agreed. Not sure why they failed other sites sell info. I think we need a third party data collection that doesn’t sell anything but gets its revenue from certifications of security for the sites themselves. They then can say that there third party monitored and therefore “safer”. Just my two cents

What it comes down to is the sites don't care. They make their money doing the minimum and still make bank via rake. They have outsourced development of their apps to India and running a poker app site is not a lot of overhead.

I love poker and wish we had online shared between the world pool. With rta apps and bots it honestly just isn't worth the hassle to play online. You just don't know if you are being cheated and even PTR wouldn't change it.

I miss PTR too.

I miss the entertaining and educational hand replayer.

I miss the inspiring UGL articles.

I miss following individual players progress.

I miss the social media side. Commenting was fun and a great way to interact with other players (as well as getting abuses).

I miss the 0-100 hotness score, the fun graphics, the zombie, the robot, the runner-runners, the top hat...

Heck, I even miss my negative iPoker profile. I'll never be a comeback king now.

Yes, I miss PTR and unfortunately, it won't be coming back. Alternatives like statname don't offer a fraction of PTR fun functionalities. They are boring and exist purely to take advantage of other players.

Of course, it was fun, even for losing players, but pros on 2+2 thought that it was bad for the game so they persuaded PokerStars and other sites to send them a cease and desist letter so they had to stop. I wish now that they would see that the social aspect of it was awesome and that they would allow Sharkscope and some new PTR to run without restrictions. It is much safer in this solver environment to have everything transparent.

Maybe I will create software for poker that would have something like PTR from the start and give that software to others.

I been thinking about this a lot lately too

I too miss PTR a lot ... used to check it all the time. Does anyone know how sites like these get their hand histories? I may be capable of answering that myself (OCR, multiple computers or virtual machines, etc.) but this seems very inefficient if you have coverage of every site.

This could be a project I'd be capable of taking on, but would definitely have to charge a fee of some sort as the time commitment would be big and not willing to do it without making a profit (at least enough to live off per month which isn't a lot for me... like 3K lol) ... also have to look into the potential legal issues of running such a site (pretty sure it's against the online sites TOS to scrape the data)

Using PTR I helped catch a botting network on ipoker mid-high stakes back in 2011/12 - all were banned on the same day and no money was dispersed back to the pool who they played against. Cheating was rife on that network. The old thread is somewhere on here.

I used to enjoy using PTR because it made bumhunting very lucrative but not sure it’s very helpful for proving anything regarding cheating to the sites as don’t give a **** anyway.

i remember that botting network. the number of nl1k tables running went from always 10+ to 5-6 over night

Yeah. A lot of whom were chasing mega whales like art54911 or whatever his name was. When he got stacked they’d all type ‘++++’ to get him to top up lol.

I don't remember if they were called PTR badges, icons or something else, but I wanted a triple sand bag for pulling off a check raise on each post flop street in a single hand. Ah the good old days.

The great thing about PTR was that it allowed the good guys to police the games. Countless cheaters that the sites were too incompetent to catch were caught by the players. Fake coaches who pretended to be big winners to draw students were exposed. Know-it-all posters who pretended to be big winners were exposed.

The argument against PTR was that it allowed the fish to see just how badly they sucked since the pros were winning and the fish were getting crushed. But in my experience as a live player, I have always been under the impression that fish are well aware of how much they suck and how much they are losing. 6 figures disappearing from your bank account and never coming back is hard to miss.

Oh baby, this brought a nostalgic tear to my eye! I always remember tophat being the dream. If you ask me, it's sort of ridiculius a cool site like PTR that gamified Grinding is long gone where the low key sites still exist and are widely used...it just feels much better to have transparency, not just select few in the grey zone using the shady stat sites.

I used PTR too back in the day. It was a lot of fun berating each other with a wink and watching each others graph & badges. I think only a few used PTR purely for bumhunting reasons, it was more social and interesting. The day I won a monthly UGL I was almost happier with the badge than with the profit
If PTR came back today i think it would mostly be used for bumhunting tbf. Not just tracking sites have disappeared or changed. The "average poker player" has changed a lot too. (by average not meaning skill level but how they behave in online poker)