Cornelius’s Weekly Rant: The two faces of PokerStars

It’s not often I criticise PokerStars but, I have to say, I find their stance on data mining sites a bit rich in light of the ‘super-grinder’ PokerStars Team Online Pro’s that they have been scrambling to sign in the last 18 months.

After a lengthy battle, lasting several years, PokerTableRatings finally relented just over one month ago, under the threat of legal action, and agreed to comply with a cease and desist letter from PokerStars that bars the data-mining website from selling hand histories scraped from PokerStars – a practice PokerStars says infringes its terms and conditions and is in breach of its intellectual property rights.

We believe that a poker player shouldn’t have information and data about his opponents except from hands he’s actually played. This is particularly important to protect new and/or weak players, who often don’t even know that they’re sitting in their opponents’ cross-hairs.

PokerStars’ Lee Jones Talking on PokerNews.com

24-TABLING: POKER OR PLAYING CHICKEN WITH EPILESPY?

Names such as Randy ‘nanonoko’ Lew and Kevin ‘WizardOfAhhs’ Thurman may not mean anything to many, but these young ‘huddies’ have extracted millions from PokerStars customers over the years, and continue to do so today, but with a PokerStars badge on their shoulder these days.

 Kevin ‘WizardOfAhhs’ Thurman 

Is that really poker? I would suggest not. It’s simply reacting to colours on a screen. All of your poker tendencies, patterns and weaknesses reduced to a simple colour code, and exploited by some kid, playing from his bedroom, who might as well be playing Call of Duty on expert. Is it really cricket that PokerStars slaughter PTR in the poker press, when their brand ambassadors are actively advertising the use of HUD’s on YouTube, and are playing 24-tables at a time with PokerStars blessing and endorsement, after having won millions of dollars from depositing players over the years? You have to ask: where did PokerStars Team Online get their hand histories from in those early days of grinding 20NL ?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not advocating or defending PTR here, I applaud PokerStars’ efforts to protect their weaker players from grinders who possess detailed stats on them without ever having actually played against them, but this, to me, is undermined by their acquisition of these high-profile super grinders as sponsored pro’s and brand ambassadors – a strategy that is presumably designed to encourage other grinders to play at PokerStars…

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