Holz a proponent of “pure” poker
A week after announcing that he is joining GGPoker’s Poker Integrity Council (PIC), high stakes poker pro Fedor Holz revealed what his top initial priority will be. In a tweet on Tuesday, Holz said he wants to advance “the strict limitation of usage of mined data & MDA with HUDs,” adding that they are “predatory.”
“There’s lots of other big challenges ahead, but I think this is an important step in the right direction to ensure fair play online,” Holz concluded.
Third-party HUDs (heads-up displays) are actually prohibited while playing at GGPoker, except if they are being used for another online poker room at the same time. To level the playing field, GGPoker has what it calls its “Smart HUD,” a free HUD tool that everyone is permitted to use. Everyone has access to the same software and the same information and nobody can opt out of having their stats included.
Datamining and mass data analysis (MDA), both mentioned by Holz, are also off-limits at GGPoker. In online poker, data mining is where a player uses software to “screen scrape” or record hand histories on tables at which they are not playing, getting tons of information quickly and without having to risk money at the tables while doing it. This data is then fed into software like a HUD to give the player more information on their opponents that they wouldn’t otherwise have.
MDA is basically collaborative data mining, with players combining all their data – whether it be from personal play or data mining (usually the latter) – which helps not only get information on individual players, but because of the sheer volume of data, collective player populations as a whole.
As Holz said, he believes in pure poker, “mind vs. mind,” and thus opposes advantages players can gain from various forms of data collection.
HUDs just helped catch a cheater
One of the primary arguments for data mining, or at the very least, third-party software like HUDs, is that players have been able to use software and data collection to root out cheaters. A recent example happened on GGPoker just before the New Year when poker players on the Two Plus Two forum used their records to see that a player named “MoneyTaker69” was winning at an astronomical rate, all while playing an unheard of percentage of their hands.
When GGPoker was made aware of the player, it figured out that they had taken advantage of a hole in the software and was “able to customize his own game client” and “deduce all-in equity by exploiting a client-side data leak vector.”
The player could not see anyone’s hole cards or what was coming in the deck – all they saw was the all-in equity – but it was enough to win $29,795. GGPoker shut the account down and refunded the money back to affected players.