PokerTableRatings

Top 20 Most Searched Poker Players in 2011

Dominating the high-stakes tables in the first half of the year with several SuperStar Showdowns against the best heads up players in the world, Viktor "Isildur1" Blom was not surprisingly the most searched online poker player profile on PTR in 2011.  After a brief disappearance, Isildur1 is back at the $50/$100 PLO (6-max) tables. In second, after taking a break to move to Vancouver, Canada due to Black Friday, Randy "nanonoko" Lew continued his consistent play which is shown in his stellar PTR graph. Nanonoko's popularity was boosted by an excellent Team PokerStars documentary "I AM NANONOKO"  released early in the year.

The third most popular poker player on PTR in 2011 belonged to the current high-stakes king, Ilari "Ilari FIN" Sahamies, who had a rollercoaster year. Ziigmund's massive swings began with an epic run in the summer which ended abruptly after a historic PLO showdown with Isildur1 that left him feeling down but staying classy in defeat. From Ilari's official blog (August 27, 2011):

I played very weak and that was fair I lost my money.Now my girlfriend has to use sunglasses few days.Only good thing those money went to Isildur,no any ...

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PTR Server Status Notice

A hardware failure occurred at our server co-location facility this morning. If this sounds familiar, its because this is the same server that went down in June. No data was lost but several features on PokerTableRatings.com will be temporarily affected.

While the server is being repaired, you may notice recent sessions / hands from the past few months not appearing and some player profiles for newer players have seemingly disappeared. This data is temporarily offline and will return when the server is repaired. Also, delivery of hand history purchases will be delayed as this issue affects the freshness of the hands we send you (we don't want to send you old hands!) We realize this is an inconvenience and are working right now with our service provider to fix this as soon as possible. We will keep you updated on the progress. We deeply apologize for the inconvenience this causes and ask for your patience as we deal with this issue. Updates will be posted to this article. Update September 26 12:30pm CST: New hands played since September 25 are now available. The only hands effected during this outage are those played between June 19 2011 and September ...

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Update: PTR Experiencing DDoS Attack

Some of you may have noticed that PokerTableRatings.com is slower than usual. For the last two days, we have been the target of a large DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack.

The traffic load is several times our normal levels and the attack is still on-going. As a result, you may experience site issues where certain features are temporarily unavailable and the website is slow to load.

Although we have measures in place to mitigate such attacks, you may experience intermittment issues accessing PokerTableRatings as we work to block the malicious traffic. We are combining efforts with our service providers to minimize disruptions and are working around the clock to resolve the issue to mitigate future attacks.

Read more about DDoS attacks on Wikipedia.

Further updates will be posted in this PTR forum thread.

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PTR Server Status Update

We are currently experiencing hardware issues at our data center. We blame the full moon... just kidding (but it really is full tomorrow). No data was lost, however several features on PokerTableRatings.com will be temporarily affected.

While the server is down, you may notice recent sessions / hands from the past few months not appearing, as well as certain player profiles not loading. Also, delivery of hand history purchases will be delayed as this issue affects the freshness of the hands we send you. (We don't want to send you old hands!)

Apologies are never fun, so let's get right into it. We deeply apologize for any inconvenience you're experiencing. We are working with our data center right now to get everything running 100% again and will communicate progress updates as they come.


Update June 15 5:21pm CST:
We are still working day and night to get everything up and running again. Several users have asked whether their sessions are being tracked during this time period. The answer is yes, hand tracking is unaffected and your stats will be updated when full service is restored.

Update June 16 12:17pm CST:
Stats from hands played today ...

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PTR in the News

Congratulations to the MarketZero team who are joining Zynga! We are
thrilled for them to be joining such an exciting company, but are also
sad to see them go.

So what does this mean for PTR and our members? Nada. PTR hasn't
skipped a beat and we're working hard to make sure PTR continues to be the best place to find stats on every online poker player.

You may see a few new faces in the forums and support, please don't
haze them too much as we’re trying to break them in easy.

If you have any questions, don't hesitate to send us an email at
info@pokertableratings.com.

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Premium Sneak Peek

The community here at PokerTableRatings.com was sent into a flurry when the announcement of the new "Premium Access" hit the front page of the site. The new premium area has been in development for months with features based on the feedback of the community. If you haven't already, be sure to submit your application to become a beta tester. All registered users at PTR can apply for candidacy to assist our efforts in testing out the new features. I got an exclusive sneak peek at the premium area and have plenty to report!

The main crux of the premium content is found in the player profile section. There is a new "Premium" tab in golden color to click on alongside what you already see with Overview, Analysis, Hands, Sessions, Opponents and Grader. Within this premium tab there are, as of this point in the beta testing, six different features to take advantage of.

The "General" area of the premium section will break down specific stats about any player you put in to the player search. There is a stakes filter that you can use that will alter the stat reports to reflect only the stats from within that ...

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PTR gets turbocharged!

Hey guys in response to the problems we've been having with the speed of the website, especially during peak visitor hours, we've started load balancing! That means we now have 2 servers splitting the traffic that used to be served by one, which should give us plenty of room to grow :)

For the curious, both servers are Dual Quad core 2.66ghz Xeons with 32GB of memory :)

Dameon

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omg, why is PTR so slow today?

Well, because 35 thousand of you visited us 76 thousand times yesterday, and it's even more today ;) Over the last couple weeks we've seen our traffic skyrocket from around 25 thousand visitors a day to over 35 thousand visitors a day, and we couldn't be happier that more people than ever are enjoying the site. Our servers on the other hand, they aren't handling it so well...

We're working on dealing with the increased traffic, but unfortunately they don't ship servers as fast as you guys hit refresh! Rest assured, we're working on the problem and we expect it to get better over the next few days as the new hardware gets up and running.

Thanks for being patient guys!
Dameon

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New Commenting and Posting Policy

Hey guys, You're great! Well, mostly :) The vast majority of you are intelligent, respectful, appreciative members and we love you for it. However, there are always a few bad apples out there. It is because of those bad apples that we've had to create a commenting and forum posting policy, which we will be enforcing strictly. We're not looking to become nazis but these less respectful members have forced our hand in this regard. The policy in it's entirety is below, and can be referenced through the FAQ or directly here. The policy can be simply summarized as be respectful, of others and of course of us. We don't provide this site as a forum for you to vent your anger at another player, and we certainly don't provide it for you to abuse our staff, so please don't do so or you will at minimum lose your commenting privileges and possibly your access to PokerTableRatings. If you're reading this post there is a 99.9% chance that you are awesome, and this policy is intended only to make your experience on PTR more enjoyable. I've pasted the policy following this ... Continue Reading

Full Tilt back up (beta)

We're testing the new Full Tilt stuff now. There is about 2.1 gigs of hands backlogged we're working on plowing through, those should be caught up on today.

Our coverage during this test is probably a little lower than it was before all the Full Tilt patches, but maybe only by a few percent. Expect to see that come up during the next few days.

Thanks!
Dameon

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