The public spat between Bodog, the US-facing sportsbook and poker room, and PokerScout, the much-cited industry analytics tool that tracks player numbers and produces aggregate data, continued early on Tuesday when Bill Beatty, writing on Bodog owner’s news site CalvinAyre.com, alleged that PokerScout’s Dan Stewart tried to extort Bodog when asked to remove Bodog’s player data from the site.
“Bodog approached [Stewart] to be removed from the listings,” writes Beatty. “Stewart thought about the request and offered to take Bodog off his site but only if they paid Stewart a seven figure extortion payment.”
“Bodog refused to make the extortion payment,” he continues. Stewart “know[s] he is taking their data without implicit permission and directly profiting from it.”
Tweeting in response, PokerScout writes: “More lies … coming from the Bodog mouthpiece website. What a surprise. So disappointing.”
The verbal to-and-fros come after Bodog attempted late last week to prevent data-mining by removing full tables from the poker lobby. However, PokerScout continued to track Bodog’s traffic numbers “largely unaffected.”
Beatty writes that they wanted to be removed from PokerScout as they “didn’t want to be listed on a site that bum-hunters use to seek out the recreation poker players that Bodog attracts,” referring to the term used to describe the act of professional players selecting more profitable games in which to play. As PokerScout only presents aggregate data, unlike sites such as PokerTableRatings, it is unclear how Bodog sees PokerScout as a game-selection tool that must be blocked.
Beatty also claims that a listing on PokerScout is like “putting a huge target on their chests,” adding that “if Stars, Tilt and AP/UB had not been sitting at the top of these ranking sites, who knows if the DOJ would have had such a hard on [sic] to take them down.”
According to PokerScout’s data, Bodog is currently listed 13th, below the US-serving Merge Gaming Network.
Bodog’s vitriolic statement comes a day after PokerScout announced its data collection was “largely unaffected” since Bodog’s poker client change.
“Our current traffic readings for Bodog are projections based on a combination of available data and known traffic patterns. While this data is more volatile than before, we believe it to be accurate on average. If it becomes necessary, we will simply publish estimates of Bodog’s traffic as we do for some other untracked sites,” Stewart writes in an official statement on pokerscout.com.
The response also points out that, contrary to Bodog’s claims, PokerScout “does not give any advantage to some players at the expense of others” in that, PokerScout does not publish individual player statistics.
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