Now that the release of the new SharkScope website is out of the way we will be launching a number of new features that take advantage of the new sites capabilities. The first of these new features is the addition of large SNG’s and Scheduled tournaments to the Tournament Selector. Initially this support is for PokerStars, PokerStars.fr, PokerStars.es and PokerStars.it but we will be progressively rolling it out on all networks.

You can now:

• View upcoming Scheduled tournaments and Freerolls
• View difficulty ratings of any type of tournament not matter what its size
• Search for any registering or running tournament by id, and not have to type all the player names into a search box.

The latest version of the SharkScope HUD now has support for the Winamax.fr network, allowing players on this network to have player statistics automatically placed directly on the table you are playing at.

Whilst we have tested it as thoroughly as we can, this is initially a beta release, so please let us know if you experience any issues and we’ll do our best to get anything fixed quickly.

SharkScope has improved its coverage of the IGT (formally Entraction) network by tracking a higher percentage of games and covering more skins. The Tournament Selector is also now supported and so for the first time players can find the easiest game to enter, on this popular network, and track tournaments in the Registering and Running phases.

SharkScope has added Neteller as a new payment option for users outside the
United States of America.

Neteller is a secure online payment method that provides an alternative to Credit Cards and Paypal.

Neteller is available in over 180 countries. NETELLER accounts are not currently available to residents of the United States of America.

With the launch of the regulated Spanish poker sites on June 6th SharkScope has updated its coverage to include the 3 largest of the new Spanish poker networks. The 3 networks added are PokerStars.es, 888Poker.es and PartyPoker.es (which includes bwin.es).

HUD support has already been added for PokerStars.es and PartyPoker.es and support for 888Poker.es will be added shortly.

Coverage of other Spanish networks will be added as they come online.

For the past few years we have made great efforts to collaborate with PokerStars on their 3rd party data collection policy, trialling various opt in procedures but unfortunately now the time has come where they are requiring us to completely implement their opt in procedure on their .com network, even for subscribers.

The changes will affect both the SharkScope website and the SharkScope HUD, but will mean that SharkScope and all its tools are now fully permitted by PokerStars, even when the PokerStars client is running.

The opt-in procedure is as follows:

By default all ROI and Profit data is hidden. To opt-in and show this data the user must send $0.03 to the user SharkScope on PokerStars.

To block your data from all users including yourself, users need to send $0.01 to the user SharkScope on PokerStars.

If you are unable / do not wish to send money from your account then you can simply email support@pokerstars.com and they will pass on your request.

To minimize the affect of these changes for our users we have, through our Opt-In Cash Giveaway and other means, managed to increase the number of opted in players to nearly 150,000, which is many times more than those who have chosen to completely block their statistics. Thousands more players are currently opting-in each week.

Whilst in the short term these rule changes do significantly reduce the amount of information available to most users with regards to looking at other PokerStars player statistics there are still many ways SharkScope can still be used effectively:

• Ability Rating

  The Ability rating is a relative score that only has interpretive value when compared to the Ability score of others but is an extremely effective way of quickly judging the strength of your opponents. Although it’s calculated based on actual gameplay and takes advantage of the wealth of tournament data available to Sharkscope to provide a statistically significant assessment of success, there is not enough information publicly available to reverse-engineer its algorithm, and so private player information remains safe and secure.

• Versus Me Functionality

  Once you have configured your own player names if you search a player who has not opted in yet, or even has blocked their name, you will see the full statistics derived from the games that you have played against that player.

To assist you in understanding these options we have created a tutorial video which is now available to watch on our SharkScope Tutorials page.

It should also be noted that the Tournament Selector is unaffected by these rule changes and will continue to function as before, allowing you to find the easiest possible tournaments, and these changes do not effect any of the other 30+ networks that we cover.

Unfortunately SharkScope had intermittent connectivity issues for about 5 hours today due to a DDOS attack targeting an unrelated website at the data center used to host our servers. This is an identical situation to the one happened 7 months ago.

We were able to recover much more quickly from the situation this time, but unfortunately there’s no way for to completely eliminate this from happening again. We’re extremely sorry for the inconvenience and please bear with us, we are doing everything we can to reduce any future down time and prevent it from happening in the future if that is possible.

Opponents is a significant new feature has now been added to the beta version of the new SharkScope website.

This functionality can be found as a tab in the Detailed Player View where you view the player’s graphs and tournament history etc.

Opponents is a complete replacement for the old Profit by Player feature and offers a huge number of enhancements including:

• Works with any type of tournaments (not just heads up as with the old Profit by Player).
• Works with any advanced search filters.
• Shows the most frequent opponents, along with the most/least profitable.
• Shows the top 10 players in each category.
• Also works with Player Groups.

Following on the release of the iScope the iPhone app we’re pleased to announce the release of aScope, an Android application for displaying your online poker tournament results. As with the iPhone app it connects to the SharkScope service for the best and most up to date statistics available.

Click here for a full list of features or to purchase it. You can also talk to the developer in our forums.

Remember if you have an idea for a mobile application you’d like to create based on SharkScope data, or any other type of application for that matter, we have a full API available for 3rd Parties.