You have no idea what I've been through with stars the last few days. After not playing poker for about 2 years I deposited and played 1/2 on stars. After playing fairly standard for a while I realised it was quite obvious two players were playing in tandem, 1 from china obv. It's been an absolute nightmare just trying to cashout the remaining money i deposited.

So question, is there anywhere I can play stud online where I'm not going to get screwed by colluders?

I have send a PM to PokerStars Rep to try get some attention to this thread.

@UngarFan, playing short-handed?

$1-2 you have goodlucky168 - pretty good player IMO

Post some hands, please.

About you question:

No, not really. Try Razz, the games are fairly clean.

if anyone ever gets anywhere with stars about this matter CONTACT ME PLZ.

Online stud will soon be dead. Every single table on Stars has the standard 2 Chinese players working in tandem. You can even see them waiting on empty tables, which will each have 2 players waiting, both from China.

Other sites offer seven card stud but the problem there is that you often won't have a lot of traffic, won't find active tables outside peak hours etc.

Complaining will be of no help, these Chinese players play a lot so they generate a lot of rake and profitability for Stars, why would they want to cut in their profits?

Pigs will fly and Ted Cruz will defect to the democrats and come and campaign for Hillary first....PS do nothing about the Russians/Ukraine players who chat away in Russian during a hand (i.e discussing 7th street strategy whilst 7th was still being played) and they do nothing on the Chinese either...

They didn't even respond.

I'll try another.

I just bought a winged pig for my dog, so maybe there is hope yet Seriously, there are Stars reps that post on this forum, have you tried asking them to address these issues in the threads that they frequent? I dunno if you'll get anywhere, but concentrating on issues that clearly violate the T&C like chatting in other languages can maybe get them to police these games a little and then look for more gray areas like collusion and soft play.

In that hand I drew the attention of the Mod who did the usual Jack****e...I also reported the hand to PS who advised that the players may not live in the same city (in a country that covers around 1/5th of the worlds land surface so no **** sherlock) so they can't possibly be colluding...

cliff notes: No point imo

well now that Amaya is going to offer roulette and blackjack, maybe you'll get lucky and they'll start forming blackjack card counting teams instead

I just quit playing stud on Stars two weeks ago, I play other games now and if I want to play stud I'll do it on another site....I have better things to do than playing tables with 2 colluders from China, Russians and Ukrains chatting in a langauge only they can understand, etc.

What other sites do you play on - might be worth checking them out?

I hope he will help.

what really bothers me the most, is how stars is making the real players look like idiots when they're claiming these chinses accounts don't breach the tos: no matter what the time this guy goodlucky and the other accounts are online. stars can't seriously tell me they believe it's the same person playing 24/7 365 days a year. it so superoviously multiple accounting it makes me sick. these guys are stealing from the community and stars does nothing to protect the players or the integrity of the game

another wave of totally new accounts in razz/stud/stud8 games

Chinese players collusion... like in Double or Nothing SnG's... just without an happy-end...in the crass oposition the the SnG's, where loads of chinese got banned, and players been refunded... In Stud Hi, they don't admit that there are cheaters, but they semi-regularly ban single accounts of Stud Hi Cinese cheaters, juts to make them get back on new accounts, they even had 1 chinese max per table, then decided to not give a **** anymore, and go allow 2+ chinese at one table, which..., ahhhhhh....

Soooo, while this sounds stereotype and racist, which to some extent is ofc in our genetics, but tit's just dimpley all about how we actually deal with it in publix...
I would like to add that I know a few chinese regs who are fair and extremely****ing tough players. I remeber a few that always helped me to start tables at 3/6 - 10/20 Stud8 cash, with no second asian coming in to the obvious spazz outs to make me fold. I even quit one of them at Stud8 5/10 HU, while Stud8 definintely is my best game!


Soooo.... Be aware of 3-handed vs two chinese at Stud Hi, but don't be racist, yoa!!! Ingnore your neandataler-genetics, and act like an actuallly cultivated human being!!!
Then you can still say 50% of chinese are full of **** and steal, cheat and copy, and that would then again be politically correct, I think.

Ha

I've read the threads from 2007 on by now. MicroBob made it take a while longer then expected.

Mailed PS got this reply:

Also bookmarked a bunch of single posts regarding this. Was planning to post them here as some sort of cliffs. But what it all comes down to is this response from PokerStars Game Integrity Team.

Cliff notes: they are going to do f___ all

and is anyone at all shocked by this...

FYP

I suspect PS's approach is more Nelsonian tbh; these players from China and Russia/ex- Soviet states make up a large (and growing) %age of the players - esp with US players still banned and likely to remain to so for a while I would guess....why risk pissing people off when you can hand out slaps on the wrist for speaking in Russian on 7th street during a hand (with both players involved in it) etc..

I played winning stud from 2000 - 2005 on over a dozen sites, many hours a day, day in and day out... (Party Poker, Pacific, little Woods, Carribean Sun, Poker Room on several skins, Absolute, Battlefield Poker, etc... Played 1/2 to 4/8 or 5/10 and made about $1000 a month including rake. Pathetic, I know. When the big shakeout came and it was only Stars and FT, I tried stars and with in 1 hour I knew I was being cheated by the Fuzhou crew. Since the PS has such a hard time detecting this I fixed there letter, hope it helps clarify the situation.


By the way. I had Full Tilt refund me large sums several times because they said they detected I was cheated by collusion, can't recall is PS ever did that. SO FT sent me back hundreds but PS could never detect even one hand of collusion? FFS.



Seems the PS Stud game is still not clean, and they don't seem to care. Caveat Emptor.

=============================================

Hello *****,

Thank you for your email. Your email was escalated to me as a member of the PokerStars Game Integrity Team.

Let me start by acknowledging, as the thread demonstrates, that you are not the first person to raise concerns with PokerStars about this group of players. (You don't say) As it turns out, all of the players that you mentioned (plus a few more) have been reported for investigation on several occasions, and as part of those reviews, a number of PokerStars poker specialist reviewed several thousand hands for collusive play, but none was found.

In addition, a number of senior PokerStars poker specialists have investigated this group of players repeatedly over the last two years.

Many members of the group have also been reviewed several times by our security department, as is standard practice for any account that wishes to cash out. Some players have sent documents verifying their identity and payment methods. We are completely convinced of the authenticity of these players, and do not suspect fraud or money laundering.

As part of these reviews, our expert collusion investigators looked for the following activities:

1) Best hand play, where the players play only the better of their two hands.

2) Pot building, where the players work together to build bigger pots when one of them has a strong hand.

3) Squeeze plays, where the players work to force other players to fold out of pots by well-timed bets and raises.

4) A divergence between their play when there are two or more players from the group and when they are playing alone.

Throughout these various reviews over the last two years covering tens of thousands of hands, not once have we found collusive play.

LOL
.... B.S. ... BS, BS,...More BS.



Further, to address the issue of stud players from China, let me go
into the background in a little depth. <---GFY



Now lets talk about stud. LOL


So, we've established the following:

1. Fuzhou/Changle is one of the largest cities in the world with millions of inhabitants
2. Cheating at Stud poker is very popular in Fuzhou
3. PokerStars has only a few stud tables running at any one time

,...more BS...


So, to summarise this rather long email:

GFY.

Regards,

Suck my Johnson
PokerStars Game Integrity Team

Last night there were a dozen tables open with only the same 'two' Chinese players at each. One sitting in, one sitting out (and who was 'in' or 'out' was inconsistent across the tables).

One was called something like pokerok688. The other was only a slight variation (pokerokok866 or something to that effect).

If it happens again tonight, I'll collect screenshots and specific tables/details, so that PokerStars' integrity squad can explain why there's nothing shady going on there, either.

You will get the e-mail I posted above.

Yes, I suspect so.

I wonder if all the live brick-and-mortar poker rooms in Changle/Fuzhou look the same... one guy's seated, another seat has chips but an absent player, and the entire casino is silently awaiting third players at approx. 20-30 'open' tables.