Five Florida rooms can stop depending on PokerAtlas.

What a source has to do

The bar is set by what the product shows, not by what a source could carry.

The product shows tournaments up to 14 days ahead. So a room's own source must show every event at least 14 days before it runs, every day, and must show changes within a day. A source that posts next month's calendar two days before the month starts fails that bar for the first two weeks of every month, however complete it is.

Each room was measured three ways:

• Format. A calendar feed or a dated web table is easy and reliable to read. A PDF with real text is readable with work. An image needs a reader that turns pictures into text.
• Freshness. When the room put next month's events on its own site, against when the same events reached PokerAtlas. Upload dates on schedule files and the change history in calendar feeds give this without guessing.
• Match. For the next 14 days, how many events agree on date and start time between the two sources.

How fresh PokerAtlas really is

Every night from 2 to 29 October. "Posting days" counts the days a room added new events inside the window we read.

Room by room

One Eyed Jacks is left out: it is becoming the first room to send its data directly through RoomDirector. "Match" is date and start time over the next 14 days.

What changed since August

• Many monthly PDFs carry real text. bestbet, Pensacola, Dania Beach, Coconut Creek, TGT, OcalaBetS and Orange City all publish PDFs a machine can read without turning a picture into text. In August these were grouped with images as the hard case.
• The Hard Rock poker sites now post dated tables with date, time and buy-in for each event, which moves Tampa to the first group.
• Harrah's now posts a monthly schedule. In August its site had none.
• Two sources got worse. The Silks calendar feed now returns an error, and Bonita Springs moved its schedule into a picture.
• Format is not freshness. Dania Beach and Coconut Creek have readable PDFs, but they post each month after it has started. A readable source that is late is still late.

How RoomDirector changes the order

The end state is rooms sending their schedule to us directly through RoomDirector, with no scraping at all. That favours the five rooms above: a calendar feed or a dated table is already close to the shape a direct feed will have, and it costs little to read.

It argues against building a picture or PDF reader for a single room. That work is thrown away the day the room joins RoomDirector. Rooms with only a picture or a late PDF stay on PokerAtlas until they partner, unless the watch shows PokerAtlas failing them, as it already does for Pensacola.

The freshness watch

Running from 29 October to 19 November, twice a day at 8:30 AM and 8:30 PM Eastern.

Each run saves what every room's site shows: page text, schedule files with their upload dates, and calendar feeds. It also keeps each night's PokerAtlas capture, which is otherwise deleted after 30 days. The window covers the start of November, when the late rooms post, and three weeks of changes inside the month.

The final order answers two questions per room:

• Which source shows each new or changed event first, and by how many days.
• Which source matched what actually ran. Turnout is recorded for nearly every one of these rooms, so the events that really happened are on record. That settles rooms like Hollywood, where the two schedules disagree.

Decisions

• D1. Decide whether to build the first five rooms as a second schedule source now, with PokerAtlas kept as the cross-check, or wait for the watch to finish on 19 November.
• D2. Decide whether Pensacola gets a PDF reader before it joins RoomDirector. Today we serve none of its events in advance.