How IdleMiner Can Help Your Poker Game

IdleMiner is one of the leading data mining programs in the world. It’s fully-automated and makes the process of retrieving valuable player information easy. It’s compatible with many of the major online poker rooms and the company offers a separate piece of software for each site. PokerSoftware.com sat down with the executive team at IdleMiner to understand how the software came to be and what we can expect from its development team in the future.

PokerSoftware: Explain what IdleMiner is and how it can help online poker players.

IdleMiner: Idleminer.com offers two types of datamining software plug-ins: The IdleMiner brand is a “set it and forget it” application in which the types of games you’re most interested in will be automatically mined while you’re at or away from your computer. Imagine having your own personal assistant keeping track of thousands of players, so when you’re ready for a game, you’ll sit down and already know exactly how each player at your table approaches it, the types of hands they’re likely to play, and the kinds of moves that they like to make in any situation.

The Handgrabber brand is an application designed to record hand histories when the poker site itself does not provide such information. In other words, some poker sites will store data on your computer for the sessions you’ve played in so you can analyze your play (and your opponents’ play), while other sites do not give you this information at all. This is where Handgrabber steps in. It records everything for you, so not only can you find leaks in your own game, but you’ll be able to analyze the play of others.

PokerSoftware: How do most players use IdleMiner? What data do they mine the most?

IdleMiner: Most players simply tell the IdleMiner software the types of games they’re interested in playing and then let IdleMiner do all of the work gathering data while they’re not on their computers (at work or sleeping, for example). By far the most popular use of our application is to gather data for Texas Hold’em game types, but we’ve also developed our software to accommodate practically every type of poker, including Omaha, Five Card Stud, and Seven Card Stud.

PokerSoftware: What knowledge is required to set up the program and what tutorials do you offer?

Idle Miner: We’ve designed IdleMiner to be hassle-free when it comes to setup. Practically all of the settings are already defaulted to selections which will make exporting hand histories to the database software of your choice a breeze. We also offer full tutorials on our website and industry-leading customer service for any additional assistance that is needed. 

PokerSoftware: What feedback does your customer service department generally receive?

IdleMiner: IdleMiner is known as the leader in hand tracking software and a large part of this due to feedback from our customers. We take our users’ ideas for development very seriously and have continued to expand functionality to meet these ideas.

PokerSoftware: How was the idea for the program created originally?

IdleMiner: While tracking software was becoming established, it was apparent that some functionality was missing from the major offerings such as PokerTracker. For example, it was very time consuming to build up stats on people and some sites simply could not be supported since they didn’t readily transmit hand histories. IdleMiner was created as a plug-in to solve these situations, making the process of building your own database automatic. It also created hand histories so PokerTracker could now be used on those poker sites that were previously un-trackable.

PokerSoftware: What complications have there been in its development? How were you able to overcome them?

IdleMiner: Poker-sites are constantly changing the way they do things and because of this, their software also changes. In the beginning, this posed major challenges any time a site would decide to make changes, such as how tables are chosen from their lobbies, how hand histories are transmitted, the format used for hand histories. Over time, we’ve developed systems that help to expedite changes so that our users experience very little hassle in such situations. We’ve gained a lot of experience over the years and the end result is a rock solid program you can depend on.

PokerSoftware: What sets IdleMiner apart from other datamining programs?

IdleMiner: As our software products are “plug-ins” in nature, it’s very important to maintain close relationships with the software companies that our products are used with. Fortunately for everyone, we have very close ties to every tracking product a customer may wish to use and are always interacting with all parties for future developments.

PokerSoftware: What plans do you have for further development?

IdleMiner: Although there are many plans for development currently taking place, one that we can tell you about is the addition of Everest Poker. People have wanted a miner for Everest for a long time and we’re excited to see the reaction after so much anticipation! More sites are on the way.