Ethics of Datamining/Banned Software use

Greetings,

I have followed the recent thread on 'Party Mine' and other past threads on data mining unobserved hands. I personally believe players have an obligation to obey the TOS, even if they think the rules are silly, petty, ignorant or unfair.

If they don't like the rules of the poker room they should find one more to their liking. I think it would be great if there existed online poker rooms that catered to the afficiando of the unobserved hand. Think of all the good fun that could be had on a site dedicated to bot wars! And what about pure poker anarchy with no rules at all!

But seriously, most players expect the card rooms to provide some measure of security. A willingness to enforce their own rules would be a good start. And it appears at least a few online rooms are taking measures to thwart rule-breakers of all stripes. And this is where the controversy starts.

For whatever reason, it appears data-mining unobserved hand histories is popular amongst many posters. I won't go into the reason why data-mining is popular as it's too obvious. Furthermore, it's true that Party Poker and Pokerstars didn't prohibit this in the past. But nevertheless, it currently violates the terms of service. And I find the willingness to violate TOS (by datamining unobserved hands) alarming.

I am interested in getting the opinion of this forum's members on the topic of data-mining unobserved hands. Hence, I have opened up the following poll: