Idleminer - The company that has created the handgrabber software that let poker players datamine, has sold their domain name to Poker Table Ratings.
This is my take on what has happened and what it means to us poker players. I don't have any inside information, but running this site has given me a pretty good understanding of how companies like Idleminer and Poker Table Ratings work and do their business.
Why Idleminer.com were Sold
The number of people who datamine has been on the decline since 2008 since it has become so cheap to buy hands that for most people, it just isn’t worth the hassle to collect the hands themselves.
As a result of this, it's likely that Idleminer hasn't been earning as much money as they used to. This also explains why their Everest handgrabber never got out of beta, as well as why they have removed the Full Tilt Poker and Absolute Poker handgrabbers from their site.
What this Means to Us Poker Players
While some of us will definitely miss the old Idleminer, I think that the sale to Poker Table Ratings is one of the best outcomes that we could have hoped for. There is no way that a company like Idleminer could have survived by selling handgrabbers, so they would eventually have had to start doing something else or go out of business. Either way, we would have been left without updates to our handgrabbers.
Since Poker Table Ratings are using Idleminer’s domain as a way to advertise their hand history service, it is in their own best interest that they don’t piss off Idleminer’s old customers. If Idleminer had disappeared over night and been replaced with a PTR banner, we would all have seen them as "the big evil company that killed Idleminer".
I’m guessing that part of the sales agreement between PTR and Idleminer is that Idleminer has to keep creating “minor updates” to their products for a number of months, and I think the excerpt below supports this:
They agreed to leave our products on the site and forward us customer inquiries. We'll continue to do some basic maintenance for the foreseeable future, until we feel we have done right by our loyal customers.
http://idleminer.com/node/156
Conclusion
Idleminer’s handgrabbers will keep working until the poker rooms make a big upgrade to their software, in which datamining as we know it will effectively be dead. Then the only way to get datamined hand histories will be to buy them.
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