Short article answering some of the questions about handgrabbers and datamining I have gotten in August 2009.
How does handgrabber work?
Well, you can create a handgrabber that reads the screen (screen scraper) and then creates the hand histories based on that information. You could also extract the information from the data that the poker client saves in your computers memory.
How to post hands from iPoker?
If you have the hand history, all you have to do is find an iPoker hand converter, which will change it from iPokers XML format to something that is much easier to read.
How to save hand histories Bodog
The only way I know of is using Bodog Hand Grabber
How to get observed hand histories from iPoker?
Saving observed hand histories are called “datamining”, and you will be able to do this with iPoker Hand Grabber.
How to datamine Full Tilt?
You need the Full Tilt Hand Grabber from Idleminer to do that.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Hello,
I’m developing a replayer and I’m trying to get sample of approximately 3000 handhistory files for every site/stake/game type the replayer will support.
I have contacted a few hh-vendors, however I think they charge too much (from $287 to $40).
So I am considering to mine them myself using idleminers products. I would like your advice on this or any other suggestions to obtain a handhistory package as mentioned for a fair price. (I am not able to advertise for any website.)
Thanks
I think your best bet would be to use Idleminer’s free trials to datamine some hands. I have made a couple of videos demonstrating how to do it.
If you need “a lot” of hands I don’t think there are any way around paying a couple of hundred dollars for either hand histories or handgrabbers. If you play poker yourself, it may be cheaper to get the handgrabbers by signing up at a poker room.
I agree that 250$+ is a steep price to pay for such a small amount of hand histories. I suspect that it may have something to do with the amount of work the seller of the hand histories would have to do in order to put together the package of hands that you need.
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A word of caution – Be sure to get hands from a wide variety of stakes. I have wasted hours when coding AHK scripts because of small differences in the formatting between small stakes and medium stakes.