Note: This is pre-announcement, so if you decide to go for this at this point, you would partially be a "beta-tester" for the whole process, software, and data involved.
In a nutshell
We are happy to announce that we are giving away free, for research purposes, nearly one billion real money poker hand histories, played on some major PokerSites this and last year, plus supporting software to read these.
Usage of the Database for Credible Research
We want to provide these hands strictly for research. Therefore, one has to be published author of at least one Poker AI conference paper, and it should be possible for us to verify that, in order to be eligible to obtain these hands. Please PM me ere, or e-mail me at findbg@gmail.com for further details.
The billion hands database contains Limit, Pot Limit and No Limit Texas Hold'em and Omaha cash games hand histories, limits from NL2 to NL100000. The inflated size of these hands is in the range of one terabyte. Therefore the hands are offered in proprietary parsed format, together with Java library for reading the hands (possibility to export them in plain text will come later). The source code of the Java library are offered for free as well (Under GPL v3).
This format, as well as our own tools makes it possible to run analysis over hundreds of millions of hands on a mainstream PCs, where otherwise one might need to spend up to hundred thousands bucks for setup able to handle the same task via conventional RDBMS.
We support no opponent profiling policy. Therefore we are taking measures to prevent usage of this database for opponent profiling. We are obfuscating the name of the poker sites from which these hands were obtained, table names, player Ids and hand Ids. We are also randomly modifying the time the hand was played (time is shifted with difference of some seconds, to still make possible the extraction of time-dependant player patterns).
Note: The end user license agreements (EULAs) of some of the poker sites from which these hands were obtained are against usage of shared databases. We have inquired these poker sites for permission to redistribute these hands in the described obfuscated manner. We have no response from all of the sites at this time, but we have not been rejected either. Despite that we have never formally and technically agreed to the EULAs of these poker sites, we still believe we did and are doing what is possible to comply with the intention and spirit of this EULAs and we will further cooperate with the poker sites if they require us to do so, to eliminate doubts, if any, that the hands will be used exclusively for research purposes, but not to augment real money play.
If you chose to apply, please fill out the below form, and send it back by PM or e-mail.
Application process
Please provide the following information.
· Name:
· University:
· Position:
· E-mail /university email/:
· Paper published /need to respond to verification send to Author's e-mail of that paper/:
· Home page:
· Purpose of request:
Alternative ways to verify you academic credibility would work as well, but will not be lighter than the above.
Please, also indicate clearly that you agree with the following terms:
All hand histories are provided to you for personal use. You must not redistribute them to third parties under any circumstances. You may use them personally without restrictions or obligations (We would be happy if you cite pokerai.org/pf3 as source of these hands in your academic work). All software for parsing the hand history database is provided under GPL v3 license. Any redistribution is bounded by this license.
I agree to these conditions/Type yes, and your first name as signature/:
