Two Plus Two Older Archives - PokerStars Reply RE: StarSpy, etc.

I've received the following response from PokerStars regarding their stance on StarSpy:

[ QUOTE ]
From: PokerStars Support [support@pokerstars.com]
Sent: Friday, July 15, 2005 12:22 AM
To: starspy AT cox DOT net
Subject: RE: StarSpy

Hello Jay,

First, allow me to state that the Email is authentic -- I wrote it. That
said, please allow me to elaborate.

I'd categorize "assisters" into several categories, starting with the
least innocuous and escalating to the prohibited evilware:

1. Odds Calculators, such as www.pokerinspector.com

These don't track any statistics on the players. They merely analyze
your cards, the pot odds, and other things without regard to the
opponents. These are always allowed.

2. Hand History analyzers, such as PokerTracker.com

These take hands YOU played and allow you to analyze your play after
the fact, or to easily track your performance. These are always
allowed.

3. Real-Time hand history analyzers, such as PokerOffice.com or
PokerTracker.com with GameTime+

These watch the tables as you play, perhaps offering a "heads up
overlay" on the table. These do little more than type 2 tools above,
other than give you a "real time" view instead of an after-the-fact
view. These are allowed at this time, but they do make some players
nervous.

The above stated, this brings us to the final two:

4. Datamining applications, such as StarSpy

These applications enable a player to access a large number of hands
hands not actually played by the player. Type 4 tools gather the
data on these hands personally and do not share the data with others.

5. Aggregation datamining, such as www.pokeredge.com

These tools gather data as do type 4 applications, but report the data
back to a central database which is accessibled by all participants.

At this time, PokerStars has no official position on these datamining
applications. We have in the past, however, shut down operations that
were datamining hands directly out of our servers and made modifications
to make such datamining impossible.

As such, though it is not a written policy, I would say that PokerStars
frowns on mass datamining of opponents against whom you have played no
games.

That said, you may or may not want to take StarSpy off the market. We're
not currently planning to close accounts of players using it, and
*probably* won't do so. There's a chance we might consider stronger
measures against category 5 tools above (as other sites have recently
done), but category 4 tools will at likely be met only with
countermeasures to limit their effectiveness.

I will say that I have actively suggested to senior management some
changes in our software which will severely limit the usefulness of yours,
including limiting the number of non-playing (observer) tables a player
may have open at once, and requiring players to be logged in before being
able to observe any table.

As I wrote in the Email (and this is a personal perception, not company
policy), I find there to be a striking difference between profiling a game
you have played or will play... and mass profiling on the off-chance that
you might encounter those players days or weeks later. While I cannot and
will not "set company policy" on that regard, I know that our current
company policy is such that the former is definitely permitted. I cannot
say that of the latter, and cannot say at this time what policies may or
may not be implemented to prevent the latter.

I do know, though, that StarSpy is definitely in that
questionable "latter" group of tools meant to datamine games in which the
user has not played and has no intention of playing.

You may draw your own conclusions from there.

Best Regards,

Jeff
PokerStars Support Supervisor

[/ QUOTE ]
As a result of this email StarSpy will be continue to be distributed, allowing users to draw *their* own conclusions whether to use it.