[kbelbina]

I generate around $2,500/mo. I operate a company which mines poker data and have a couple of partners, plus some large server / tech / support costs. No-one is full time on the business any more as after Black Friday there isn't a lot of $ in poker: http://hhsmithy.com/

[Timothee]

If you, like me, are wondering what "Black Friday" is in the context of poker, it refers to United States v. Scheinberg: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Scheinberg

United States v. Scheinberg is a United States federal criminal case against the founders of the three largest online poker companies, PokerStars, Full Tilt Poker and Cereus (Absolute Poker/Ultimatebet), and a handful of their associates, which alleges that the defendants violated the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA) and engaged in bank fraud and money laundering in order to process transfers to and from their customers. (...) After the indictment was unsealed on April 15, 2011, a date quickly dubbed Black Friday by the online poker community, PokerStars and Full Tilt stopped offering real money play to their United States customers.

[asciimo]

This is fascinating. It took me a while to discover the purpose of subscribing to this data, and I finally found it at https://www.hhsmithy.com/tour

"Finding the best tables to play on is impossible without up to date statistics and data on the player pool and consistently playing pots against opponents with no reads or statistics is a sure fire way to lose your bank roll fast."

How do you harvest this data? Do you use player bots?

Also, you have a typo on that page: "Your on the cut off with AJo and a player under the gun has opened". Should be "You're".

[kbelbina]

The data is used with 3rd party tools that scan tables, find the best seats, display statistics etc. The most popular tool is holdem manager (http://www.holdemmanager.com/). After buying data off our site you can import hundreds of millions of hands and have detailed info on almost every player on a poker site (how often they raise, fold, call etc etc). If you also scan tables and sit with the "fish" (recreational players) then you will win a lot more. One day I'll write a blog post about what online poker is really like (game theory, tools, and statistics).

On the tech side its some fully reversed clients that we just have linux command line clients which connect to sites, and other sites its a ton of Windows XP VM's which open tables and observe. At the heart of it all we have some command servers which handle distributing the table load, parsing and aggregating all the data etc. Each day we "mine" over 10 gbs of data zipped and at peak times can be watching over 10,000 poker tables. It's pretty nuts that it somehow all works.

And yeah, lots of typos :-O

[bjterry]

It's crazy to me that online poker companies make this information available. Shouldn't tables be private or something to stop this?

[kbelbina]

Yeah, a few sites have made it so you can't observe tables but most sites allow it. You'd have to ask them why but I assume that casual players like to observe before depositing and they don't want to scare away the casual players (who are the life blood for a poker site).

[chisness]

what are some of your main competitors? i know tableratings was big in the past but then got blocked out by pokerstars (and apparently now ftp as well).

[kbelbina]

hhdealer.com, hhmailer.com, handhq.com are the major competitors. After Black Friday there are lots of small localized (especially Eastern Europe) competitors. Poker Table Ratings also provide search, and we built something to do that too (PokerCloud) but ended up selling the tech and domain.

Its an interesting world though where only us, table ratings, and mailer actually do mining (as far as I know) and we sell at wholesale prices to some of the other resellers. And then of course there are lots of people who buy hands and without our consent resell them through forums, web sites etc and that is an ongoing battle. We all have interesting ways of marking our hands so we can track them back to users and ban them.

[myleshenderson]

Typo: Playing multiple limts and games.