Dan and I have talked a long time about having me as a guest contributor to Pokerati, but we never could find the exact right angle. What we ultimately decided on was a discussion about online poker trends. As someone who does consulting for online poker sites and is an active member of the affiliate community, I have some insights that might be interesting and slightly outside of the scope of most of the poker discussion here.

I have been following a few threads on two plus two recently that I think could use a bit more attention. As many people know, there is a site called pokertableratings.com that data-mines all of the major online poker sites and provides visitors with charts and such. Really just enough information to whet your appetite to get you to buy some of their pirated data. For a long while they operated as a free site and, mostly, people did not mind them or feel a need to object until they started selling the data that sites like Full Tilt and PokerStars prohibit players from using.

When players are able to have access to information that they have not collected, that crosses a line. And when you know your opponents have more information than you do, it creates a temptation that puts online poker players at a crossroads similar to athletes with steroids.

This is a particularly frustrating topic for me because I am a co-developer of the Bluff Poker Software and the owner of Bluff.com. Certainly, we knew it was possible to do what TableRatings is doing, but it did not seem like a long-term winning plan to build a site that was essentially an enemy of online poker players and online poker sites. Our software (which is in Beta) allows players their own private database so they can review their play after the fact. While players can share hand histories with other people via our forums, each player is given the option to keep all of their hand histories private. We are basically a scaled down (but online) version of some of the information you get from Poker Tracker or Holdem Manager, which are programs that sites deem legal because it is your own information that you have collected.