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.

We’re looking for someone who based in Italy to help test the SharkScope HUD on various Italian networks and to create accounts there to help our developers fix bugs etc.

If you interested please contact support@sharkscope.com. It will most likely require only an hour a week and the tester will get free access to the HUD and $100 a month.

Unfortunately SharkScope has been experiencing intermittent connectivity issues over the past 48 hours due to a DDOS attack targeting an unrelated website at the data center used to host
our servers.

The data center we use is one of the largest providers of such services with a global network and multiple redundancies.
Sadly however, not even the most well resourced companies are immune from the effect of a sophisticated DDOS attack. We are following up closely with our provider and keeping the pressure on to restore stability to the site.

Fortunately, no game results were lost due to these connectivity
issues as we have other redundancies in place.

We’re very sorry for the inconvenience to the effected users.

SharkScope has overhauled its tracking of the iPoker network, including iPoker.it. The new system improves coverage and adds “Tournament Selector” functionality, including the ability to search by Tournament ID for registering and running games. The tracking has also been designed to be much more resilient to client change which should result in significantly reduced downtime.

SharkScope is proud to announce that public access is now available to the beta version of our entirely new website.

http://beta.sharkscope.com

Please note that as this is beta software, so there will be bugs and we want to know about them. We are also looking for as much feedback as possible. What features do you like, dislike and what else would you like to see added?

There are too many new features to mention all of them but here’s some of the main ones:

General

• Search all networks at once for a player name.
• Linkable pages and browser back button support.
• Native currency support. Previously SharkScope was natively storing data in USD. Now you can search natively in any of our supported currencies.

Advanced Search

• Many new game type filters e.g. Rush and Easy Tournaments
• Option to Exclude any game types.
• Show first, best and worst x number of results.

Player Results Table

• Sparkline graphs integrated into statistics tables.
• Customizable player results table (choose from over 30 different statistics).
• Re-sizable results table
• Private player notes.
• Create public and private player groups. Option to consolidate those groups into a single player name.

Graphs

• Zoomable Interactive Graphs
• 1 click export to jpeg

Tournament Selector

• One search now auto refreshes for 1 minute.
• Average Ability Column option.

Tournament Results Display

• Registering tournaments auto refresh.
• Overall Tournament statistics shown for all tournaments including completed ones.