Online Games

You know, it seems like every month someone is exposed for crossing some sort of line in a poker game and getting into trouble. Recently pokerstars caught Chinese players who shared their cards at sit/n goes, and this large cheating operations took hundreds of thousands of dollars. But Pokerstars is vigilant. If you have not yet signed up, use a pokerstars marketing code to get your bonus.

People have had money confiscated from accounts, and been banned from sites. The most disturbing thing isn’t that this is going on though. It’s the fact that a lot of people, even those who aren’t being caught, don’t think it’s a big deal. That’s just the weird world of poker. It lives in it’s own little gray world, filled with gray people, doing gray things all the time.

Because of this, there is often no consensus on where a line should be drawn. For example, it’s been ruled that playing multiple seats in the same tournament is not ok. But, if you and your friends each individually enter a tournament, but play out of the same bankroll, that is ok. The distinction is subtle, and at a practical level is close to meaningless. Assuming all play is “honest” what is the difference between ten people each entering the same tournament ten times, and those people each entering ten different tournaments and sharing the results? This sort of stuff has been going on forever. Men ‘The Master’ has made a fortune out of doing this, yet he and his horses are still allowed to play at any tournament that they like.

So when it comes to the new breed of players getting caught red handed, I can certainly understand how they slipped down that slope. There are just so many examples of poker biggest and brightest — from authors to champions to internet pros — bending, twisting, and to suit their own personal needs and desires that it almost seems like it’s part of the game. That doesn’t make it all right though.

The problem is that without clear rules and guidelines, players looking for an edge will do everything they can in order to make it as large as possible. This takes all kinds of forms, from coffee housing to shorting chips, from active collusion to shared bankrolls. What is fair and what is not when it comes to poker? It’s a hard question to answer, and it’s one that a lot of smart people have come to very different conclusions about.