Ok, thanks a lot Indy.

The wording's kind of difficult for me to understand, but now that these people have been caught it will retroactively be a 7-man sng that pays the top 5 non-colluders in the games in which 3 confirmed colluders cashed... if that makes any sense or was even what you are saying.

Good post from jordyun - so there may be varying degrees of guilt or innocence amongst the chinese players, if they want to show they are not colluding they need to show a decent number of showdowns against the others for all their chips.

Is there anyway to search through Hand Histories to find any showdowns for a group of names? I can compare two players with a saw/showdown filter in HEM but doing all combinations is going to take too long.
Obviously Stars should be looking for these things automatically.

Using the method of bumping everyone else up one notch if a colluder cashed:

10-man game with 3 colluders and 7 non-colluders:

If any colluder cashes, his spot is given to a non-colluder
If a colluder does not cash nothing happens

So no matter what in this game 5 of the 7 non-colluders will cash. So at a $105 you are paying $105 and 5/7 of the time you get $205 if you are a non-colluder. You can see how this is a better result than if you were playing with other honest people rather than colluders and the site would be giving you too much compensation?

Also, I can't disagree with those who say that the nature of Double or Nothings could encourage collusion, but (and possibly it's different for the No Limit DoNs) I generally find it easy to spot if you play attention to what's going on.

For me, I've been playing online poker since August '09 and really just turned it on since Feb 2010 and it has allowed me to build a bankroll with very little variance that I don't think any other style of game would allow.



I would be extremely unhappy to see these games leave any time soon and would actually love to see more players move to the PLO DoNs as we have no where near the traffic of the NL DoNs

The problem we all have is that (we believe from previous posts) stars only confiscated around 10% of the money 'earned' from this collusion.

Now, lets say they find a hell of a lot of this fraud and start using the methods you suggest to pay players, which apparently is the norm.

Previous poster suggests they'll simply use whatever they confiscated to refund players. However this will end up falling way short of what is due back, assuming they properly look into this.

If regs are estimating it's costing them tens of thousands of $s each (which imo is actually accurate), then as players that is what should be given back to them. In many cases, players will have lost VIP statuses or forfeited bonuses because of the roll on effect of the inevitable huge sudden downswing.

I've read numerous responses from stars support, and the glaring issue that players have clearly not been refunded in games previously when others playing in the same games have is very worrying. I anticipate that we will end up being left with having to accept a small share of a small pie, accompanied by a load of phoney reasoning about why it was such a hard issue to deal with and why refunds are so small.

The only option that would satisfy me personally would be if stars really went to town on this and started refunding entire buyins where colluders were present, or simply carved up their entry fees and gave their 'share' - $10, $20, $30, $40, whatever it might be, to each player who unwittingly joined the tournament containing these cheats.

It shouldn't be to our detriment that stars haven't caught these players fast enough and are only left with a small pie with which to feed the many cheated customers. All speculation of course, but I don't get a good feeling about this right now.

Exactly! So even though we do not want cheaters in our games, once we catch them it's actually to the benefit of everyone playing (once they are confirmed cheating obv). This is why it's important to be alert and vigilant and not be timid about reporting suspect activity to Stars. I think I've actually even been reported on a few occasions, because I've had cashouts hung up while Stars did a review of my gameplay. Fine by me, because at least players are taking the initiative to remove troublesome activity, even if they are way off the mark in my case.

lol where did this thread derail at to lead to the point of players posting brags in a collusion thread...

I remember when I look up stats of some regs at mid to late last year, I found that they are either new or 1 to 3 months players, and they jump right into $52 or $104 from day 1 and start getting the ROI close or above avg regs. Looks like they are either born to be $52+ DoN player or .........

New account doesn't always mean new to poker though. Many of these are just regs from other sites coming to stars cause they have heard that the games fill faster than Carl Lewis on heat.

I agree 100%. The thing that you guys have going for you in this situation is that it is pretty highly publicized. I was just told of it today at a table and had no problem finding dozens of articles. So maybe Stars will reach in their pockets on this one. I mean, imo Stars support is >>>>>>>>> than any other site. They have a great image and you can really see that they put in effort to retain that image.

I guess I just can't understand how this happened for so long and maybe it's because the PLO DoN's are almost always at least 50% regs (usually more probably).

If you guys haven't, check out daleroxxu's blog as it definitely goes into a lot more detail than most threads.

Not what I was leading at. But with people down-talking the DoN format, I want to explain that I've found a niche and don't think I could've made the br progress I have in such a short period of time without them.

I DO have an interest in recruiting more people to play PLO DoNs because there may be 1 $50 game A DAY and maybe 1 $100 every 3 weeks. There's nowhere near the traffic as in the NL games.

I'm jealous of players of about every other style of game that make huge scores while I grind my ass off playing these boring ass DoN games, so it was far from being a brag. 10k over 5500 games is not far above min wage.

I predict the end period of DoN games will become turf war between collusion groups. atm we assume all colluders are working together, in fact there maybe already collusion guilds like the following:

1. Mighty China
3. United Elite Of American
4. Europe DoN Alliance
2. DoN Union Of Russian
5. Commonwealth of DoN

They actively use new accounts to get contacts and recruit new member on table chat which most likely speak the same language. Guild masters may make treaties between each other to team up or gang up on others.

There are plenty of games where the collusion helped you- i.e you were 4th in chips, one colluder helps out his buddy in 6th to the detriment of the person in 5th place.

There are also plenty of games where the collusion didn't affect the outcome of the game- i.e one colluder busts in 9th with kk to ak or something and the rest of the tournament plays out legit. Or when hero busts 9th or 10th and up until that point everything had played out legit.

So I think the disbursements are more complicated than "I played in a game with 2 colluders and didnt cash, give me my buyin back."

I also believe that Star Support on collusion is the best, if this happen on other sites, they may not find out within year or 2, or NEVER!