Poker Almost-Resources on the Web

Some of the modern wave of Internet poker players stop at almost nothing in an attempt to improve their game... nothing, that is, in the informational sense. Whether it's analyzing and improving their own play, or trying to learn everything they can about the other folks at the table, these players continually chase after the Holy Grail of Poker Knowledge.

Sure, Poker Tracker is the leading play-analysis software, and a slew of competitors such as PokerStat are on Tracker's heels. A number of sites offer instant hands-odds and other calculation-based poker information, and if you haven't visited PokerStove, you've missed learning about a neat package. Let's not forget to toss out a "Hi!" to the folks over at Wilson Software, who've produced player-training software packages since the days when poker wasn't even cool.

I could make up a dozen posts on the topic of poker software and online resources, toss in the links to match, do the happy-poker-camper shuffle and wander off to another topic. But, hey, what's the fun in that?

It's every bit as entertaining to check out those online tools that are trying to carve out there own online poker niche... but for one reason or another, just don't quite get it done. Such is the case with a site that was tossed out at a recent online table, a reference to go visit thepokerdb.com. Thepokerdb.com advertises itself as "your free source for tracking online tournaments and players." It turns out that it's only the tournament results for one site, PokerStars, but there's an impressive database here anyway, with over 425,000 players and all Stars tournament results since February of 2004.

Impressive, if not useful.

If you're someone who's played in a lot of Stars tournaments, or know someone who has, then amuse yourself by heading over to thepokerdb.com, register, type in the screen name, and check out all those tournament results. I'm in there, though I play only seldom at Stars, and even then only in some private tournaments. (Those don't show up.) And that's the big problem with a site like this: it can tell you that a player might be good, but it cannot tell you that a player isn't good, because the lack of information about poker skill is not the same as the lack of poker skill itself. Important difference.

So what this site is, in essence, is a brag forum for folks that play a lot of tourneys on Stars. Cool enough if we don't make any more of it than that.

A similar site is Tournament Reporter, which gathers tourney results from many more sites but offers stats on them over a much shorter period of time, a maximum of 60 days. Again, it's a fun idea that suffers in the execution. I don't see any way that this software tracks players who change their screen names on Party, and I know that it doesn't track Prima with any accuracy whatsoever. I've played lots of tourneys at Prima in recent months, but according to this site my screen name doesn't exist. Bzzzzz. I believe this absence is caused by the fact that most (if not all) of the action on the Prima Network comes through the various poker "skins," not the core Prima site itself. (Skins are sites that subcontract to the main poker software engine, but market themselves independently.) Since most Prima players participate through these skins, it means the Prima core stats are largely useless. There's also no way to combine player performances across sites such as Stars and Prima, even if the player uses the same screen name at both.

But let's give these database sites gold stars for the effort, at the least. Both are stabs at establishing a global database of online tournament performance, which would have some meaningful value. But that day is a long way off, if ever.