[ristas]

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... At some point they will realise that the core database holds too much power and hand histories will be dropped. HH grabbers and screen scrapers will be written and be banned but there will always be "ways around" the rules. ..

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If a poker site really wanted to get rid of the problem of datamining, fish finding, etc they could do it in a day. There is a very simple solution for which there is no work-around. They can simply allow players to change their screen names frequently. Hell, they could let players play anonymously.

That would be spell the end of most of the database driven software helpers, fish-farming, etc that some of these sites seem to be worried about. Interesting question is what would this policy do for the site? It could increase traffic if the site promoted the fact that no other players could datamine you. Or it could hurt traffic as the pro dataminers go elsewhere.

An intermediate answer that might be optimal for the sites - allowing a player to change his screen name semi-frequently, say once a month or even once a week. This would allow some short term trends to be picked up by observant regulars or via datamining, but the advantage would be much more limited.

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if players will play anonymously the part of the game containing notes and reads from previous sessions would be worthless and poker would loose a lot.
as for a problem of datamining poker sites might just not let to observe games.Simply all you could see would be stack sizes and names.