Online Poker profiles

Lately, there has been a lot of controversy about various websites publishing people’s online poker profiles. Through such websites, people may pull valuable information on their opponents, and thus gain an unfair (or at least dubious) advantage on them. The whole thing goes down based on players’ usernames. The data is sometimes made available with the consent of the players (who upload the data to the site themselves) but sometimes without their approval. A whole industry has sprung up around data mining and for a small membership fee, you too can check out the stats and sometimes even detailed analysis of any opponent you come face to face with at the tables.

The question is, is data mining hurting the online poker industry? What are its short- and long-term benefits for players?
The short term advantages are obvious: you gain an inside look into your opponent’s style of play without him/her ever being aware of it. That way, you’ll know how to adapt your style to your opponent’s and thus you may well finish an otherwise losing session in the black. It is quite awesome, isn’t it? There’s just one problem with the setup. With the ever increasing level of competition in online poker, it is just a question of time till more people adopt the new data mining ways than those who choose to go without its short term benefits. That will pretty much kill the already small edges many lower stakes poker professionals live by, and it will push online poker further away from its origins.

Many poker rooms have already started to take aggressive steps against data mining. Players can now randomly change their usernames on a weekly or even daily basis, thus they never build up enough of a history with one user name to let anyone draw any sort of useful conclusions based on it. Even though they enjoy the benefits of data mining, most savvy players are not exactly pleased about having their stats made available to all comers by a third-party entity, after all, when they read the privacy policy of the site they signed up to, they did it with the exact point of avoiding such scenarios.
On the other hand, websites where players are allowed to upload their poker profiles, and which give players full control over the details they share, do not really fall into the data mining category. These sites publish useful reviews of poker rooms where their members play and they provide visitors with a wealth of useful and legally, not to mention ethically unquestionably obtained information.