How exactly does sharkscope or PTR data mine all those hands?

Question

I'm very curious to know how this process works. These sites (http://www.sharkscope.com and http://www.pokertableratings.com) data mine thousands of hands per day from secure poker networks, such as PokerStars and Full Tilt.

Do they have a farm of servers running applications that open hundreds of tables (windows) and then somehow spider/datamine the hands that are being played?

How does this work, programming wise?

Answer 1

I've been wondering this too. Another site http://pokeroptimizer.com updates my stats almost immediately after I finish a game, so they must be watching like every table

Answer 2

I had always assumed they had each table opened. But i really have no idea.

Answer 3

I've thought about this, and have two theories:

The "sniffer" sites have every table open, AND:

1. Are able to pull the hand data from the network stream. (or:)
2. Are obtaining the hand data from the GUI (screen scraping, pulling stuff out via the GUI API).

Alternately, they may have developed/modified clients to log everything for them, but I think one of the above solutions is likely simpler.