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Comment by yannyu | Hacker News Reader

I'd love to do this with play-raise-fold frequencies by number of people at table. Are there relatively untainted public poker hand datasets? WSOP tournament data maybe?

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There's a piece of software out there called PokerTracker that allows a user to gather hand data for real-time statistical analysis. There are users out there who have very large databases (Billions of hands) and some users who will buy/sell/exchange these databases.

You can buy huge databases from other players, yes. They're full data sets, not "tainted," and have far more hands than have ever been played in the WSOP.

It's considered bad form in the poker world, and generally against site TOS, if you're a player using the data to have a read on a player before you've ever played him.

If you're just doing research, nobody cares at all. They might even give you the datasets, if they actually believe you. Or perhaps if you let them anonymize them?

Unless I've misunderstood you, it's really not considered bad form at all. It's considered pretty standard amongst professional poker players that most everyone (at least the professionals) are all using some form of HUD (heads-up display) that will overlay stats next to each opponent's name, detailing all sorts of useful information about the player's tendencies. It's almost mandatory to use a HUD if you like to multi-table more than 4 tables at once.

Collecting and mining hands you play\see is fine but its the buying and selling of other people's datasets that is bad form / banned. In the small circles of nose-bleed games, it is resembles collusion when a team shares data to undermine a single target across a set of games.

It's still pretty standard to mine hands that you didn't personally participate in. Lots of players mine nonstop. You're right that you're probably crossing the line when you buy/share other people's datasets, as you'll get information that your opponent can't possibly get without also sharing/buying datasets. That being said, of the nose-bleed players I personally knew it was still the norm to share data with your friends. I think at that level you just have to assume that all of your previously played hands are visible to all your opponents and adjust accordingly.

I think I played a little over a million hands online and probably have a dataset with millions more on top of that. If you want it, I can probably find it and send it to you. Email is in my profile.

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