Stars Aggressively Cutting Out Datamining Sites

If recent emails players are receiving from PokerStars support are accurate, it appears that the online poker giant is undertaking a major change in policy that would effectively cut off the ability of datamining sites to access and aggregate tournament results.

Here’s an excerpt from the email in question from PokerStars support:

Please note that in our efforts to prevent datamining, we have restricted the lobbies of many types of SNG tournament. All of the draw and mixed game Sit Go’s are now restricted, as are 90 and 180-player NL Hold’em Sit & Go’s.

‘Restricted Lobby’ means that once the tournament begins, the list of entrants and finishing positions of each player are only shown if you participated in the event.

If you wish to follow the tournament, you can go directly to the tables, or use the ‘Find a Player’ feature to find a specific person.

In a very near future, this feature will be expanded to the rest of the tournaments.

Stars has made various moves over the last few years in an attempt to curtail datamining, but this latest policy seems to be a bit of a sea change. While someone will no doubt find some sort of workaround, the new policy would, in theory, prevent sites like Sharkscope, PokerDB and the like from reporting results of SNGs and (depending on how you read the email) MTTs on Stars.

UPDATE: A request for clarification from PokerStars returned the following response:

This measure to prevent data mining, will eventually be expanded to the majority of the Sit & Go tournaments.

So, MTT datamining is sticking around, at least for the time being.

UPDATE: Stars posted the following statement on the policy on 2+2:

At PokerStars we believe that the only people who have the right to see your Sit & Go tournament history (including ROI, total profit, and so on) are you, and people you explicitly choose to share that information with.

This is just one of several measures designed to undermine SNG results database websites, which knowingly violate our Terms of Service and our players’ privacy. The restricted lobbies are planned to be gradually rolled out to the majority of SNG tournaments.

Of course, we do not wish to undermine players’ ability to track their own results, or to share their results as part of a staking arrangement (or whatever). Quite frankly I’m shocked that so many people say they use online results databases to track staking, since the methods such sites use to gather their data are extraordinarily primitive and unreliable. Some sites that claim to offer 99+% coverage in fact miss 20% or more of our tournaments that they claim to track.

At PokerStars, any player can contact support@pokerstars.com to get their ‘Tournaments Played’ report at any time. This report is broken down by MTTs, SNGs, and HU SNGs. It includes the following data:

- Date and Time that the tourney started
- Tournament ID
- Game (eg. NL Hold’em)
- Currency
- Buy-In
- Rake
- Amount spent on Rebuys / Add-Ons
- Finishing Position
- Number of Entries
- Amount Won
- Target ID (for Satellites)
- Qualified Yes/No (for Satellites)
- TLB Points Earned

We can send you this report in either HTML or Excel format. The advantage over web-based results databases is obviously that this data is 100% accurate.