We are pleased to announce the addition of our new Global Alias functionality. This option, which is available on the Search Database page in the first drop down menu, allows you to combine multiple usernames from multiple networks into a single alias that shows your overall statistics.
Once created this alias can be searched by all other users.
SharkScope today announces improvements to its coverage of the IPN.
Tracking now includes Registering and Running games, which are searchable by Tournament Id, enabling the use of the “Tournament Selector” for the first time helping players find the easiest tournaments to join.
Game collection has been optimized, reducing the average from 10 minutes to 2 minutes for a game to appear in the SharkScope database.
Overall coverage is also now estimated to be 99% across all game types.
SharkScope today announces improvements to its coverage of the Swedish Poker network Svenska Spel.
Tracking now includes Registering and Running games, which are searchable by Tournament Id, enabling the use of the “Tournament Selector” for the first time helping players find the easiest tournaments to join.
Game collection has been optimized reducing the average from 10 minutes to 2 minutes for a game to appear in the SharkScope database.
Overall coverage is also now estimated to be 99% across all game types.
In the past, the use of SharkScope whilst playing has been prohibited by PokerStars. In an attempt to resolve this issue and get SharkScope back on the allowed list at PokerStars we are trialing a new opt in system.
We believe that its to the benefit of all our users if we can find a way for our service to adhere to PokerStars 3rd party software rules and yet still provide the ability to rate all players by default.
The new system 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.
Transferred money will be returned within 5 days.
Players who have not opted in can still be rated using the “Ability /100” rating, which was designed to accurately assess a player poker ability without making it possible to reverse engineer that player’s ROI or Profit figures.
Note:
At this point neither ourselves or PokerStars have committed to this using this system after the trial period is over and we welcome comments to be posted here either positive or negative to help us decide whether to implement this system fully.
Edit:
In answer to some common questions that have arisen:
We’ve introduced a forum style activity feed for our videos and blogs categories as a clear and simple way of viewing the newest posts and comments in these categories. They’re located underneath their menu items in the drop-down list.
This should keep discussions relevant longer and show which topics are generating the most interest.
If you haven’t already, critique a video you’ve unlocked, join in on a discussion, or start your own. SharkScopers is an extremely community oriented site. We’ve seen much higher interest in the videos that have multiple positive comments vs. the ones with negative or no comments, and authors love to see a reply on their posts.
We are pleased to announce that our coverage of FullTilt results has now resumed after the recent FullTilt update to a new cross platform client.
We are now tracking the vast majority of tournament results again (with the current exception of Matrix tournaments which we hope to add tomorrow and scheduled tournaments which will follow shortly after).
We are still working on the Tournament Selector so it will be a little while before this is up and running. However the searching of registering and running games by Tournament ID is available again.
The SharkScope HUD has been tested to work with the latest FullTilt update, but if you are still experiencing any problems please contact support@sharkscope.com with the details.
FullTilt updated their software on the 8th of July and tracking resumed on around the 12th of July. Unfortunately all tournaments played between those dates have been missed and cannot be retrieved.
We cannot insert missed results based on user reports because we require independent verification of all results to protect the integrity of our database.
Thanks for bearing with us…..
SharkScope continues to improve its coverage of Ongame’s new P5 client by today announcing increased tournament searching capabilities and significantly reduced tracking time.
Searching for Ongame tournaments by the new P5 tournament reference is now supported for both running and registering games. In addition, the “Tournament Selector” function has been enabled for Ongame for the first time. These powerful features are backed by huge improvements in the Ongame tracking time with most tournament results now appearing on the system within minutes.
One of the common – and more amusing – threads I see on many of the internet forums is discussions about what fraction of online tournament players are profitable. One of the most frequent guesses i see is 5%. Often someone will then post that SharkScope has in its FAQ that 1/3rd of usernames are winners. The person will who suggested 5% will then immediately claim our numbers must be wrong.
Why they think we would get this wrong I have no idea – but for psychological reasons players seem to want to believe the number of winners is small. The losers want to feel more justified in showing that they haven’t won any money because its extremely hard to do so, and presumably the winning players want to feel that their accomplishment is even more special.
So what are the exact numbers? Based on our entire database 26% of players are winners. If you exclude rake, then the number is more like 33% of players are making money against other players.
The fraction is also surprisingly constant for the different tournament variants, for example if you filter for just heads up games, the percentage of profitable players is still exactly 26%.
The number varies somewhat by network, but not as much as you might think. For example take a look at the table below which is the fraction of winners for all players who have played at least 100 games:
| Network | % Profitable Players |
|---|---|
| Merge | 44% |
| Cereus | 39% |
| B2B | 33% |
| Cake | 32% |
| Party | 32% |
| Ongame.it | 31% |
| Everest | 31% |
| Sky | 31% |
| PKR | 30% |
| PokerStars.it | 29% |
| IPN | 28% |
| SvenskaSpel | 27% |
| PokerStars | 27% |
| Pacific | 27% |
| PokerClub | 26% |
| Betfair | 25% |
| Ongame | 25% |
| FullTilt | 25% |
| iPoker | 24% |
| CryptoLogic | 23% |
| Peoples | 22% |
| iPoker.it | 20% |
| GiocoDigitale | 17% |
You can see that most networks are grouped around the 30% mark. There are some tracking artifacts that effect some networks numbers, for example if a site does a lot of guaranteed tournaments with overlays or freeroll tournaments then this will directly boost the number of winners. The clearest case in point is the Merge network, which manages to have a huge 44% of players making a profit presumably due to all the money they are pumping back into the network in the form of their $50k Guaranteed tournament that often has a 3x overlay.
For some networks, such as Everest, we don’t yet tracked scheduled tournaments and so the results don’t get a boost from these types of bonus tournaments, if there are any.
Another factor effecting the winning percentage is obviously rake. We’d expect most of the Italian networks to be at the bottom of this list as they tend to charge significantly more rake than their global counterparts. Its still hard to understand why GiocoDigitale has such a small fraction of winners compared to other sites though. We can probably speculate about that until the cows come home…..
In an effort to make it easier and faster for people to judge player abilities across wildly different stake ranges and tournament types, SharkScope has now introduce its custom “Ability” rating.
To form this rating we analyze all the statistics and results we have on a particular player and then give them a numeric rating that goes up to 100 for the very best players.
The rating takes into account that a player losing a small amount at high stakes, is likely a better player than a player winning money at low stakes – and so gives you a genuinely global rating of poker ability.
SharkScope has now added support for the Cereus network (which includes Absolute Poker and Ultimate Bet) to its HUD (Heads Up Display) tool. In addition to this, support has also been added for the Italian iPoker network which includes skins such as Sisal, Snai, EuroBet Italia and PowerPoker.it.
Stay tuned for more announcements as we add support for other networks….