Sharkscope took to its socials yesterday to inform users that GGPoker stopped the poker tracking site from recording tournament results. Sharkscope is claiming the move was made “for the apparent reasons of optimizing the player experience and increasing security.”
GGPoker, the largest online poker site in the world, is the global home of the World Series of Poker. This change not only affects GGPoker, but all the poker sites it powers: AllNewPOker, BetKings, Olybet, BestPoker, DakaPOker, Natural8, OptiBet, PPIPoker, TiltKing, and YouLePoker.
Poker data for sale
Sharkscope collects player and tournament results from many poker sites, including all the ones that operate in the United States (PokerStars, Partygaming, WSOP.com, etc.). A hybrid subscription/free service, user can look up the results of any player they come across while playing online, but a lot of the good stuff is behind a subscription wall.
Curious how GPI Award winning Dumptruck69 is doing on WSOP.com in Pennsylvania? Take a peak and get a picture on Sharkscope, which gives non-subscribers five free searches a day. That’s Cherish Andrews by the way, the 2022 GPI Female Player of the Year, who just won her first WSOP Circuit ring on Aug. 19.
Sharkscope takes users information and disseminates it into data that poker players find scrumptiously delicious, like ROI and in-the-money percentages, number of tourneys played, and how they finished in them on average.
Take a peak.
Results from the latest tournaments are also shown, even if players never opted-in to Sharkscope, which they must do to have all their information displayed.
The site also has extensive leaderboards and offers upgrades like heads-up-display and analytics that start at a $6 month subscription.
Players can opt-out
Andrews could contact Sharkscope and opt-in and see the other pieces of information, including what would be a very sexy chip graph. Or she could completely opt-out, which would stop the site from displaying anything about the poker played under her username except that she opted-out.
So instead of allowing its players to choose whether or not they want their generated poker data to appear on Sharkscope, the site took the decision from them.
GGPoker has not commented on why it made the move to stop Sharkscope from using the data generated by its players. I’ll update this story if they do.
The change will not prevent Sharkscope users from searching how players have done in the past, but it does close the door on the data generated in the present and future. That included information about their own play, which many players use to sharpen their game.
On-site options
While other sites, like WSOP.com in the U.S., have banned players from using poker tracking tools like, well, PokerTracker 4 that gives players insights about their opponents (as well as their own game), GGPoker went the other direction and gave its players some of these tools for free. It’s the only site to have done so.
Smart HUD is GGPoker’s answer to Sharkscope’s own heads-up display that gives players their overall view of their opponent’s statistics right on the table as they play. The site also offers users its PokerCraft feature, which allows players to deep-dive into their game through analytics.
It’s quite possible that GGPoker simply wants to level the playing field even more by preventing its players to utilize information available on Sharkscope. After all, this falls in line with its blanket ban on third-party software, like PokerTracker 4, while playing.
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