BETWEEN September 2009 and March 2010, software watched as about 4 million people worldwide checked into some of the world's most popular poker websites and played an estimated billion hands. The results reveal patterns in play that could help inform how poker is regulated and uncover a wealth of information about one of the internet's most popular pastimes. "It's a data gold mine," says economist Ingo Fiedler at the University of Hamburg in Germany. "It is interesting for regulators, academics and also for the treatment of problem gamblers." To gather the data, Fiedler turned to the poker-market spectator Pokerscout.com. Its software logged the locations of players, game outcomes, the date and time, and the commission paid to the operator by people playing on the two biggest sites worldwide at the time - Pokerstars and Full Tilt Poker (the latter has recently been shut down amid allegations of financial irregularities) - as well as smaller operators, Everest Poker, IPN Poker and Cake Poker.
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