Imagine sitting down at a poker table with 9 total strangers and automatically knowing everything about their game. You know when they fold, when they raise, and when the tend to just call. Imagine having knowledge equal to sitting with each of them for hundreds of hours and closely studying their every move. This is exactly what a data miner will allow you to do. When used along with a heads up display and tracking software (like Poker Tracker) you can have thousand of hands of data displayed right on your screen for every player at your table. You can have little numbers floating around each player that give you insight into their inner most thoughts. How does it work?

A data miner will open and close tables while you are away from your computer and record every action that every player at those tables makes. Your computer can be watching 20+ tables at a time while you are sleeping. This data is then imported into a database and the stats are displayed directly on your poker table with a heads up display. So why is it important to have thousands of hands worth of data on every player?

You may play 30 or so hands with a player and think you have them pegged. They haven’t played a hand yet so their super tight right? The answer is maybe. 30 hands is better than 0 hands but what does it really tell you. Maybe that player had a really cold run of cards and just didn’t have anything worth playing. The truth is that the sample size is just too small. Now if you’ve been data mining all week you may well have a few hundred or a few thousand hands worth of data. This data may tell you that the player in question is not quite as tight as you may have though and is not a good candidate to try to run over. The truth of the matter is that the larger the sample size, the more accurate the date. With datamining you are sure to have a good sample on nearly every poker player you run into online.

Data mining is also helpful if you use any type of poker table scanner for table selection. With a lot of data on everyone at the table you are much more likely to find and play in the most profitable online poker games available.

The professionals are data mining and know a lot about you. Shouldn’t you have that same advantage?

Professional poker tools is a series of articles. The author is not affiliated with nor does he sell any of the software discussed in any of these articles. Please view the authors other articles to find more information on professional poker tools. Please note that not all online poker rooms allow data mining and you should make sure you are not breaking any rules before you mine any tables.

The author has played poker full time since 2005 and makes the majority of his income from online poker. He currently plays poker online and gets RakeBack at Absolute Poker.

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