I play on Pokerstars and this morning all was fine with looking up players in Sharkscope.This afternoon any player I look up does not have data for Av. Profit, Av. ROI and Total Profit. All of these fields say that they player must now opt-in to make this data available.So, I'm guessing I may as well cancel my subscription now, there's not going to be many players that will pay the required 3 cents to opt-in.
http://www.husng.com/content/locked-sharkscope-records#comment-30697
Hi.
Thanks for the link
Yea, huge thumbs down.They should be allowed to display everybody's profit over $20,000 (unless the player wants to be blocked). The interest level from casual players in profit is quite large, probably as large as the negative of being made fun of or seeing their negative stats.Oh well, "perfect world" wishes and so on.
I completely disagree with your post, Ryan. One might argue about the sense of blocking stats. Howsoever, the fact remains that useing sharkscope while running the pokerstars client has been forbidden for YEARS. I think it is not necessary to tell you how many players ignored this? Those who did decide to act within the T&C of pokerstars were literally screwed by the inactivitiy of pokerstars to challenge the violatiors of their own T&C. Don't you dare to tell me that this illegal knowledge was not worth anything for those who actually used it.The argument that one can block his stats is no reasoning after all, since not every player has the interest / english skills / knowledge about sharkscorpe in order to do so.The way how things have peen handled in the past has been noting but a total joke.
Hi.
I disagree Barrin.
First of all, PokerStars had previously said they wouldn't enforce the Sharkscope prohibition, because players complained loudly and publicly when they did.
Second, they are stats. We keep track of stats in sports, in live poker, in many, many fields. Stats are interesting, people want to see how much someone can win in this game and it drives many players to play the game.
If you want to say that sites like PTR that display the actual frequencies of bets and other actions of players are different, I can agree, but lets not pretend that knowing if you're up 20k or 30k or 40k makes any difference in my decision making when facing you first hand of the match.
Knowing that someone is down 100k versus up 100k may make a slight difference, but my argument is not to allow all the stats, but to allow the ones with 20k or 30k in profit and above, to keep the interest in the game.
As far as blocked stats, yea some may not know about it, others do. It's like that in life though. Some people may not know about medical disability, or student *edited borrowed money word out bc we keep getting spam for this word* or whatever. Tell PokerStars to inform their players about Sharkscope if fairness is your primary concern, but my primary concern is that needless obstacles are not placed in the way of more players deciding to play poker, and when a newcomer can no longer see that Serkules made 300k so far this year or that livb has made millions lifetime, then I think there is a less than best solution being drawn up.
Think about the equality argument a bit more though Barrin. Not every player knows about husng.com, so it's unfair that those that do can benefit from it? What about PokerTracker, HoldemManager and other tools? We should outlaw them until every player is aware of them otherwise some might get an advantage? We could also give players that have to work 40 hours a week some extra edge to face those that just play poker all day, bc it's unfair that the workers providing for their families can't learn at the same pace.
At the end of the day, I guess you may believe that stats should be private, but I think that runs counter to success in just about every sport or form of entertainment ever (movie tickets, box office stats, total profit in poker, live MTT winnings, baseball stats, basketball salaries, CD sales). Color me disappointed x10 by this policy.
As a side note, nothing was "illegal." There are no laws that prohibit Sharkscope or other things from being used. PokerStars forbid it in the terms and conditions, but publicly stated they would not enforce it. It would be like smoking a joint in Amsterdam or California or drinking a beer in 1930 USA.
Anyways, the real point is that Sharkscope has been more for entertainment than anything else over the years, particularly these days in the higher stakes games where every reg basically knows who the other regs are and random players are insta sat. Long passed are the days where people would sharkscope a player before sitting them, at least in the three digit buyins.
ROIs, fine, block those. Total profit from losing players? Block that too. But big winners need to be seen, celebrated and showcased to the masses if we want to maximize the growth of this game. The rest of the crap you and I said in our posts is just details.