by Mario Alfonsi | Published on Apr 20, 2012 | Updated on Apr 20, 2012Complying with a cease and desist action sent by PokerStars, popular data mining site PokerTableRatings.com has decided to end their data mining operations on the world’s largest online poker site.The decision came Wednesday evening, just a day after PokerStars had sent the legal notice to PTR. PokerStars claimed that PTR was violating on its intellectual property, and that the data mining services that it provided ran afoul of the poker room’s terms and conditions – specifically, those that did not allow players to gain an advantage by having information on hands their opponents had played, unless the player in question had also taken part in those hands.“We believe that a poker player shouldn’t have information and data about his opponents except from hands he’s actually played,” Lee Jones, Head of Home Games at PokerStars, said to PokerNews.com in an interview. “This is particularly important to protect new and/or weak players.”In that same interview, Jones also said that PokerStars had tried many different solutions to come to an agreement with PTR, but that the failure of those negotiations and other “techniques” ultimately necessitated the threat of legal action.On Wednesday evening, after a short outage, the PTR site returned with a notice that they would no longer be providing premium services for PokerStars.“Recent contact by Stars has led to the removal of this network’s player profiles from PTR,” said a blog posted on Wednesday. “We will fully adhere to the cease and desist notice by Stars, though we do not believe that we are a disservice to the online poker community.”Despite the decision, PTR continued to defend the value of their service.“The most contentious aspects of PTR seem to be the premium services we provide…however, when compared to widely-accepted poker HUDs from other software providers, we believe the differences are negligible,” they wrote. “We continue to search and most importantly detect bot rings month and month and provide information about these true game-breaking activities to brands that care about the integrity of their games.”Despite the loss of service to PokerStars, PTR is continuing services for most other major online poker sites.
