FullTilt on tilt over OfficialPokerRankings – Bad Move

C’mon. Really? Banning OfficialPokerRankings because it provides an “unfair advantage”? Reasons why that’s asinine:

1) Anyone can request to NOT have their information revealed (if you believe you’re at some sort of disadvantage – take your own info off the listings)
2) It’s free and open to anyone to use – if you and I both have an “advantage” then neither of us has an “advantage” (though we dispute that there really is any advantage to be had, because…)
3) It doesn’t really tell you much (if anything) that you can use against another player. No hand histories, no % of times betting, folding, re-raising, hands played, VPIP, etc. No cash game history. No idea of whether you’re a tight/aggressive, loose/passive, etc. player. Only results are shown. Over the long haul, they can ONLY tell you that whatever this guy does works well or doesn’t work so well.
4) FullTilt provides THEIR OWN leader board information including nicely customizable leader board filtering – where’s the big difference??

Reasons to allow OPR rankings to stay up:

1) For lower stakes players it IS truly important to watch your own stats move up the “rankings”. OPR isn’t used to “scout” other players, but to monitor your own progress (based on OPR’s definition of progress).

2) When it comes to those other players – the ones most of us look at are our friends and acquaintances. Why? To monitor their hoped for progress and movement up the rankings. It’s community, boys. One of the reasons you have your own FullTilt Forums. And, surprise, the forums aren’t the only way to build community – many of us track friends on OPR.

3) Collusion Control – While I haven’t used it for this purpose myself – I can certainly see where it could be useful to look at various in-the-money results to see if players “Ima Colludin” and “WithMe” seem to be working together in various tournies.

In poker, it’s never a good idea to go on tilt – looks like that’s what FullTilt has done this time though.

Karaoke Phil

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