I posted this in the old, long thread in the "Internet Poker" forum, might as well put it here too:
The success of these "Changle gangs" from early 2007 until summer 2008 was based on systematic all-in abuse. There were several groups doing this. Disconnection all-in protection feature was finally removed from the Pokerstars software in August 2008.
Please remember that many players from China did not break the rules, or didn't have any link to these cheaters. Some of these honest guys were very strong stud players.
All-in abuse can be a very powerful way to cheat in 7 card stud. I assume it can earn the cheater up to 5 big bets / 100 hands, if all the others in the ring play honestly. I base this estimate on how much the low stakes players cashed out. (This extra 5 BBs by the way could make a rather primitive bot profitable, I have a pet conspiracy theory about this, I may post it later.)
Early 2008 these Chinese accounts were under extensive review, but Pokerstars staff focused on collusion suspicions, all-in abuse wasn't taken seriously. And collusion did not happen between Chinese players, quite the opposite, they always played aggressive against each other.
Many of the players (proper term would be "accounts" - no reason to think they all were different players) lost their all-in privileges from time to time, but these were again returned by request, sometimes multiple times for same offender.
Losing the privileges permanently was no catastrophy either, Pokerstars accepted any new player who could send a scan of ID card, no matter how close the link to an existing cheater was. There are plenty of people in China, maybe some of them are willing to borrow their ID card for a chicken.
Sometimes lively debates ensued between different Pokerstars workers, some of us would have wanted to force stricter rules on these obvious cheaters, but usually the ones supporting sloppy management policy won.
Not only did they play from same ip address, the money transactions were a bit unusual too. One account did all the deposits and cashouts, then transfers were done between the accounts of the same gang.
These groups would accuse each others of all-in abuse, but some groups seemed to have mutual understanding that it wasn't in anybody's interest to rock the boat.
And they were actually very clever at jumping through the loopholes, the all-in privilege could be returned to an account that hadn't played a hand after losing the all-ins, hence there wasn't anything in the database. Sometimes an account that got the all-ins back would first go to $1/2 table to disconnect a couple of full houses for alibi, then move up to $30/60 and make some money.
After management finally accepted the problem, and decided to remove the all-in protection, I took the liberties and banned the most obvious group who had seven or eight accounts, all winning stud players playing from the same ip address. These were really juggling with their accounts, action always happened with an account that had the all-in privileges. Their account notes looked like a battleground too, with some colleagues writing stuff like "Please don't return all-ins to this cheater", followed by a happy note from another poker specialist: "All-in's restored as per request."
Two weeks silence, then a new account appeared, and started playing and all-in abusing from the same ip address.
I then asked Game Security management if I may close this one too, but they forwarded the case to Multi-accounting Team. In a couple of days the answer came: There is no real evidence of this account being a duplicate. I went and closed it anyway, but the boss was a bit grumpy, as the player had passed the test (and I quote) "with flying colours."
Unfortunately as the end result of the August 2008 change somebody also decided to put the honest players to a "Related user group", which means they aren't allowed to play in same cash table. That practically put them out of action in the mid-stakes stud games on Pokerstars.
Most of the clear all-in abusers were not punished in any way, but they may have moved on to some other site which still has the all-in protection.
By the way, many accounts have number 168 in them, doesn't mean they are from the same group. It's just a very lucky number in China.
*****
Another thread about the handling of game integrity issues:
http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/28...doubts-395814/
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