Do sites like pokerstars ban you for it? I just saw one zoom crusher recommending it, but I kind of remember it being at least unethical some years back.

It breaks the terms and conditions, but it's also really hard to prove a player gained that information maliciously, so in practice it's not usually punished. That said, there are a lot of people on this forum that will consider you a scumbag for doing it.

Now that I think about it's very similar to buying chess databases of games. Completely fine there. Sites actually promote this. Lichess has an opening tree of over 300 million games. Anybody can study this for pool mistakes. But of course you can't use this resource during a game. So does this mean I can buy hand histories to study them but use my own database of hands for my hud?

Using the HHs you got from others when your opponent isn't generally doing so, risks you getting banned if proved or even suspected. It is not too different if you used it on your HUD. It might be possible to get your info from some training site where they have studied some top player's lines, and you play against him, but no guarantee. It isn't against the rules to observe before you play against someone, that's done by you, but if done by a bot, unlikely supported.

Lichess makes it possible to observe, play through the games played by someone (not sure if you can make them private but they make many private settings possible). You can download your games, analyse their games. There is no non-commercial rule in chess you can't datamine and use a team or whatever you want to analyse their games.

That isn't allowed in poker even when more or less done. You could make a book about any chess player and he can try to sue you for royalties, while doing the same of some poker player, it has been done by a training site (not a book), and I suspect you could play someone yourself and publish a book and share it with the world anyway you want, but datamining and more so using those would often get you in trouble, published or not. Some sites don't seem to mind about it (but read their terms), like Chico where they even have a NLH software that does or at least did it for you.

Pucmo, just to make absolutely sure, is it really not allowed to study bought hand histories? That's like banning someone if caught buying a chess book. This reminds me a bit of some companies trying to copyright chess moves and failing utterly. It's free information for all. Obviously sites can ban anyone they want, but it doesn't make it right. Why isn't there an open software for poker with low rakes and free analysis? Lichess started 10 years ago. Poker is way behind times.

you don't get how poker's a game of incomplete information and chess isn't then

Oh and the crusher publicly recommended to buy hands in his blog in runitonce. Nobody said anything negative about it. He hasn't been banned on any sites for it.

Are people on Lichess paying $25k to buy into chess tournaments? If not, comparing chess to poker is as helpful as comparing poker to baseball.

You asked a simple question if sites like PokerStars allowed players to buy hand histories. That's a binary question and the answer is "no". Not sure why your response is anything other than "ok, that sucks. Thank you for letting me know".

It becomes public information in a showdown. Chess players also get profit if they get to use the same opening trap multiple times. But it's not really possible anymore in classical games due to databases. That doesn't mean it's a bad thing to have public databases of games. It's just another way to work on your game.

You can already study population tendencies in poker as long as you have been dealt a hand. So the only difference to buying hand histories is time. It takes like a year of playing to get accurate population results. I don't really see a big ethical difference.

Obviously there are big differences between poker and chess, but it doesn't mean you can't make a good open software for poker. It might seem impossible, but usually there's always a way.

When I made the question that's all I wanted to know, but then I thought it about it more and found it really strange compared to chess.

If you use the search function, there are threads where people ask that exact question.

Short answer: There are open source poker platforms. The fact that you don't know about them is the reason why none of them are successful.

Well if there really are then I will support them. Mind telling any names?

https://www.pokerth.net for example

The front page is just a forum? No wonder it's not more popular.

Just wow.

So I raise you pre, you flat in the blinds, board comes ten high rainbow. You don't get how having bought ten million hands that you haven't played and worked out, through no effort of your own, that I might, say, overplay an overpair in this spot, and that might be a bit of an advantage?

You also don't get how that is different to working out the best move to play as White on move 6 against the Najdorf? And that you can work that out, both without knowing that I play the Najdorf, but also without even having a single game in your database? And that the best move is completely independent of what I might do?

I don't know if my English is failing me or you write bad English. I didn't really understand you. So let me just explain what is possible in chess. You can play online for 10 years slowly improving your skills. Let's say you reach 2200 strength. Then you can join an otb tournament. It's perfectly allowed to study your opponents games even if they can't find a single one of yours. You can punish all the mistakes you find in your analysis, and hope they still have the same flaws. Nobody will judge if you win a tournament as a nobody, as long as you didn't use any help during the games. Instead, people will actually congratulate you.

OP, the only thing you need to know is that buying hand histories violates every site's Terms of Service.

Thus if you do so and get caught, you get banned from the site and they keep your money.

Choose wisely.

That's OK, some people just don't want to understand these days

As a non native English speaker I'm fine with the fact that I will never understand English perfectly. A conversation is all about team work. The point isn't to make the other guy fold. I failed in understanding, but you failed in expecting me to understand. We both lost time.

Yeah that much is clear now. Still some questions remain. Why did a known zoom crusher on ps publicly recommend buying hands? Why is this site trying to sell their course on research of 200 million hands? https://pokerdetox.com/course/cash-cfp/

Because he gets a kick back for promoting them? And they don't care about poker sites ToS?

Seems like a good note to wrap this up on. OP, if you have further questions about why someone is breaking a site's ToS, you should ask them. If it concerns you, let the site know.

I'm going to lock this up now as threads about ways to break sites' ToS aren't something we allow, and while that may not be where the OP wants to go with this, we seem to have exhausted the other avenues. If another mod sees it differently, feel free to reopen.