N 82 50 24 / Nat Arem Blog

You met me at a very strange time in my life.

Start of thepokerdb

I have never published this anywhere else, but I figured this is as good a place as any. There’s one person who no one in the poker world has heard of, but actually had a brief but pivotal role in the creation of thepokerdb. His name is Richard Reich and he registered in Feb of 2005 on PSCrew, the forum that I used to run a long time ago. Oddly enough, the email chain started because of a policy that I made regarding profile pictures on the site, but I took a look at his website and saw a technical background in his resume. I was having technical problems trying to create thepokerdb, so I fired off the following email on Feb 18th, 2005 at 10:22 AM:

Richard,

I took a look at your site and couldn’t help but notice the technical expertise in your background. I am hoping you might know someone who can help me with this problem that I have…

We are try to implement a cardplayer-like tournament tracking system for stars MTTs — ie., links tournaments & player names and allows one to drill down, but it would only show final table results. I have a database component for my portal that will allow me to set this up, but I don’t know how to get the data from stars. We could input it manually, but that would be incredibly time consuming. If we were forced to do this, we would have to restrict the database to higher buyin tournaments only because of the number of tournaments being run on a daily basis. Ideally, of course, an application would grab tournament results on its own. A downgrade, but still better than what we have now, would be a program that grabs the info from a table that is open on the screen. It would be fine if the program automatically generated an excel file or something like that. The problem is that I just don’t know how to write such a program. I’ve tried looking at the packets being sent from stars (using packet sniffer software) and I’m not sure if it is even possible to write such a program.

Do you know how to do this? Or do you know someone who might know how to do it?

Thanks a lot,

————————-
Nat Arem
aka N 82 50 24
————————-

Only years later do I realize what a noob I sound like. I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. Bringing up excel files for storage (LOL) is just a huge joke, but it’s what I understood at the time. All I knew was that I wanted the data and that once I had the data, I would be able to do cool things with it. At the time, no one had any idea how much the big tournament players made or even who was really winning in tournaments. I just didn’t know how to get the data and more importantly, I didn’t have much disposable income to pay someone a lot of money to build a program to get the data.

Lo and behold, I get this response about two hours later:

I don’t know how to do it. (I just did a little experiment and was surprised by the outcome. I had thought that PS would not email me the results — not the hand history, but the results — of a tournament I was not in. Wrong. They will email any tournament’s results to anyone. That is an essential start.)

Poker Tracker knows how to hit on PS automatically for hand histories for ring game stats, so it might be instructive (or maybe useless!) to try to figure it out. It requires that the poker room client be running, so it apparently uses some kind of windows application puppet-string manipulation (I am not a Windows guy! :). If that is in fact the case, then changing that string-pulling to get tournament histories instead of hand histories should be relatively easy. Certainly easier than doing a direct invasion of the client-server protocol!

You might ask the Poker Tracker folks how they do the automatic hand collection. Maybe they’ll just tell you. Alternatively you should ask a Windows god how to sniff the interprocess communication that PT uses to pull the strings on the PS client. Or maybe the techniques of messing with another app’s menus is well-known?

Moving from the emailed hand histories to a tabular representation of your choice is an exercise in Python, Perl or even C or Java programming.

I don’t know enough to productively help you with the Windows-specific part, but I (and a zillion other people) can help you with the transformation from email tournament results to usable data.

I hope this is helpful to you.

-r

I learned a number of things in that email. First, I learned that it was pretty hard to actually intercept anything passing back and forth from a poker client and that I might as well give up on that for the time being. Second, I realized that Richard was right in that I could just use the tournament histories to get the thing built — I hadn’t realized that yet, as dumb as it sounds now. Third, I started to read up on ways to parse the text data into a database using the regular expressions (Perl) available in php. I’d never really known about text parsing … I’d just assumed I would use some Excel to MySQL converter, which is obviously really dumb looking back on it.

Of course, it was still a very long road from there. I did, in fact, email PokerTracker about working on the project with me. They never responded. I started getting tournament histories in bulk from PokerStars … at the time, there was no limit to the number of tournament histories that you could request. I imagine that the activities of myself and some others caused a limit to be put in place later that year. I then found a business partner who was a php/database expert and he wrote the parser and we took it from there.

But that email from Richard taught me a lot and put me on the right path. Definitely a huge turning point.

Thanks Richard.

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