[jb9]

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I disagree that the use or banning of software tools needs to be considered as an "all or nothing" issue. I think it should be practical to say "X is allowed, Y is not," but so far none of the sites have been very successful in defining these issues let alone enforcing compliance.

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that is why i advocate that ALL programs be banned. mrmoo made a good point, that ethics is in the eyes of the user. because, in all fairness to every poker player, we cannot allow joe public to make the rules on what is fair and what is not, poker sites have to ban all poker programs to keep the playing field level.

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I don't agree you have to ban ALL poker software, but I can see your point.

But before you can ban anything, you must have a way to enforce the ban. I believe PokerStars has publicly stated (on this forum) that they do not have a "1 player to a hand rule" because it is unenforceable.

This is a major difference from B&M poker, and I really don't see how you can enforce it. If a friend of mine is playing poker and I'm in the room, how can PokerStars stop me from looking at the screen and saying "fold, he has a flush"?

Likewise, you cannot stop players from using Poker Tracker (or similar software) unless you refuse to give players hand histories or you intentionally format the hand histories to be so varied that there would be no automated way to import them into a database. So far, no major site has decided to do this.

In the end, it will be a business decision, and frankly, I don't think the sites themselves have security at the top of their priority list. Most of their energies are going into marketing and promotions, managing customer accounts, new software development, and maintaining their servers and systems.

Until players start leaving sites due to poor security, the sites have little motivation to increase security efforts. (Right now players leave sites for: poor software, poor customer service, poor server reliability, poor account management, and poor promotions -- edit to add: poor games.)