Hi everyone,

Don't know where else to turn to and this is my first post here so I hope I can get some answers from this community.

I'm not a professional online poker player and don't make a living off of it, I just play in my spare time and with little money. Meaning I deposited 100$ in both Full Tilt and Pokerstars recently and play only low-micro SNGs and Cash games. So, no 1000s of dollars here. Turning out to be a good thing because Full Tilt suspended my account a few days ago on the grounds that I was colluding with a friend of mine.

A friend of mine was on the site and we did play some SNGs together but we did not tell each other our hands, we just know how we play because we've been playing live poker for years. FT found this suspicious so they suspended us both and I'm still waiting to hear back from them. That's fine, I can understand their perspective I guess - I just wish they didn't need so much time to "investigate".

In the meantime, my friend and I opened a PokerStars account and we played ONE sng together, among multiple games that we each played without the other, and this morning I wake up to find out that Pokerstars froze my account! I called my buddy, same thing happened to him.

It's extremely annoying, PokerStars didn't even email me or warn me or nothing, just boom your account is frozen contact us to find out why. I emailed them but God knows how long they will take to respond.

I'm pissed. I did nothing wrong, I play for pennies compared to what others play with on these sites and I feel like I'm getting jerked around for what? Because my friend happens to love poker and wants to play online as well? We can't join the same sites and play in the same sngs even though we don't collude? Total bs.

Just needed to vent a bit I guess, sorry for the long post, but if someone can tell me/guide me/advise me on what I can do to get these sites' attention about re-opening my account so I can play some poker I would truly appreciate it.

Thank you!

In future when you and a friend are being investigated for collusion, try to at least wait until that process finishes before creating accounts on a sister site and playing together. If you like, toss you and your friends user names on both sites and perhaps with some of the tracking sites we can see the story. Since you are both clearly in the right in your mind, you should happily provide this information.

All the best.

You should get a reply from stars pretty quickly, i've never been waiting longer than 45 mins on a reply email from them if I have any problems. How did they know you were friends btw? Tbh it seems like you could have been colluding as there isn't much evidence so show that you two weren't. You both sign up at the same time deposit the same money and play the same games? A lot of money can be made from micro stakes so your argument that it's only pennies is kind of irrelevant.

I'm sure they will look through your hand histories, see how many times you play hands against each other, how big the pots are, what hands your folding when one of you opens. If they think at all that you might be colluding your account will be suspended.

I'm sure your a nice guy and in my eyes your innocent until proven guilty, but FTP and stars have to be strict on these kind of things.

What stakes were you playing btw?

So Full Tilt are investigating you for possible collusion, because you played with your friend, and then you open an account with Pokerstars, which is owned by the same company, and do the same thing on their that triggered the investigation on Full Tilt. Maybe you where not concluding, but your action on Pokerstars seem at the very least dumb.

Also note that just because you don't know your friends cards doesn't mean there was not collusion. You could still have been soft playing each other.

Thanks for the kind responses, from at least two of you.

My friend and I didn't join the same time and didn't deposit the same amounts, we don't even play the same types of sngs usually. On Full Tilt we played quite a bit in the same sngs and I guess we could have unintentionally been soft playing each other even though we didn't exchange what we had until the hand was over. Honestly though, thinking about it now, I think there was only one instance when both of us ended up in the money, and a few more times when it was just one. Usually, neither of us did.

We joined Stars because we had no idea how long FT was going to take (I heard horror stories about days and days with no response) and we both had the itch to play so we joined. We were thinking of joining Stars regardless.

I guess believing too much in our own innocence, we played an sng together (neither of us ending up in the money) and then the next day: frozen.

As for them knowing we're friends, when Full Tilt sent the initial email asking about our relationship with each other we thought we shouldn't lie that we didn't know each other personally and were good friends who knew each other's playing style all too well.

In hindsight, I see it was a bit foolish to join PokerStars without waiting for a response from FT, but in all honesty I had no idea that the two sites were even affiliated. Like I said before, I'm not a professional poker player, I only joined PokerStars for the first time ever a few days ago. Had I known that Full Tilt would share info with PokerStars, I would have definitely waited and told my friend to do the same for after the FT thing got resolved.

Anyways, thanks again. PokerStars replied to my email but only said that they forwarded it to the proper dept and I have to wait more now.

I'll just have to wait it out I guess and let them do their investigating and hand checking. I realize that it's an important and serious part of their jobs, I just wish they could be a bit faster about it - especially when the stakes involved are like 10$ Sngs at most.

PS: I was about to give out our usernames but needed to ask my friend about it as well and he declined saying there's no point to it and that he didn't want the poker community knowing his username and associating it with this regardless of our innocence and gullibility. I can see his point I guess.

In that case, there's no point in keeping the thread open.

Good luck with FTP/PS.