On bovada I saw something which imo is pretty sketchy and I would like others opinions as to whether I'm justified in reporting this as collusion. At the end of your response please reply collusion or not collusion based on which side you lean more towards.

$500 gaur lo8 mtt $22 buyin with 35 entrants

on final table in final 6 with payouts as follows
1 $258
2 $160ish
3 $120ish
4 $80ish
5 $45ish
6 $40ish

blinds: 300/600
Stacks seats position and action are as follows:
seat 1: 1847 dealer folds
seat 2: 15743 sb folds
seat 3: 13940(suspect imo) bb calls raise pre(instead of reraising the 93 more and then check folds the flop after taking 4 seconds to act for 93 into a 2700 pot
seat 4: 14873 utg folds
seat 5: 1293(suspect imo) utg1 raises to 1200 with only 93 chips left then bets 93 on flop into 2700
seat 6(me): co folds 15004

flop is q68
seat 5 has ajk8
seat 3 has k65j

equity preflop is

ProPokerTools Omaha Hi/Lo Simulation

1,086,008 trials (Exhaustive)

Hand	Pot equity	Scoops	Wins Hi	Ties Hi	Wins Lo	Ties Lo
adjdks8s	57.42%	405,816	629,819	67,152	211,248	1,296
kh6hjs5d	42.58%	243,446	389,037	67,152	356,656	1,296

equity post flop is

ProPokerTools Omaha Hi/Lo Simulation

820 trials (Exhaustive)

board: q86

Hand	Pot equity	Scoops	Wins Hi	Ties Hi	Wins Lo	Ties Lo
adjdks8s	84.63%	645	693	18	144	0
kh6hjs5d	15.37%	77	109	18	48	0

My arguments:
seat 3 could have put seat 5 allin preflop but did not.

seat 3 could have put seat 5 allin on flop but did not.

this should eliminate chances of misclick mostly.

seat 3 did not have 2222 and actually even hit a pair

seat 5 was playing lots of garbage the whole time and that is how he got short stacked in the first place

seat 3 was playing really fishy in a few situations(like weird activity such as playing 9972 and k228) but vs me and the other big stacks at the table had only shown down good hands and played pretty decent in the majority of situations

seat 3 had not made any clear misclicks before it but was playing kinda loose postflop

seat 3 was registered 3rd in the tourney so clearly he regd before it started(not late reg donk) and in the end he beat me headsup when he went to headsup with a 40k chiplead to my 10k after coolering me in 2 hands back to back in final 3. this leads me to believe he might actually be a somewhat good reg(although def not great)

I said that fold looked very sketchy and possibly like collusion in the chat and 2 other players agreed while 3 didn't respond and 5 said he had a real monster and that even though 3s fold was alil weird he would have prefered the call because he knew he was way ahead.(this makes even less sense to me because it is omaha hilo and either 3 wins 2700 without a showdown 100% gauranteed or gets called for 93 more into 2793 and risks holding up or having to suckout(as any mediocre player would know) without any low draw and just a pretty decent high hand.

and just to satisfy your curiousity here is 5s equity vs a range of 100% of hands on that flop

ProPokerTools Omaha Hi/Lo Simulation

1,448,120 trials (Exhaustive)

board: q86

Hand	Pot equity	Scoops	Wins Hi	Ties Hi	Wins Lo	Ties Lo
adjdks8s	58.18%	565,784	1,042,897	28,116	124,170	20,330
xxxx	41.82%	326,610	377,107	28,116	612,170	20,330

I think 5s statements that he wanted a call were a bluff to try to prevent getting reported for collusion.

What I stand to gain is possibly moving up the payouts to 1st place money or getting a refund of 22$ for my buyin fee if it is decided by the site they were colluding and also probably preventing these 2 from colluding again in the future on this site.

Cons to reporting them both are that I might be getting one fish and one semireg fish banned from the site unjustifiably.

Thoughts and conclusions?

How do you know the hands?

smells like collusion.................

You can look up the hands after a few days since it's all anonymous anyways.


@OP Could just be a fish I've seen this happen a few times over the last few years. I would report it can't hurt really not sure what the issue is.

If the security department has any sense, they will check a bunch of hand histories and find out if this was an isolated incident of stupidity/misclick or if something fishy was going on.
There's no harm in reporting it, especially if you just say "This one hand seemed weird. Can you look at some others for me?"

Didn't read op.

If you ever have any suspicions of collusion just report it immediately to the site. It's the site's job to investigate. That's what you pay rake for.

Thanks everyone. I reported it. Still no word back and bovada is down today.

Has the internal investigation caused this?

They never got back to me about it.

Probably not collusion. MTTs are not the game of choice for colluders - it's too rare that you'll be seated on the same table as your partner in crime, and the odds of both of you getting to the FT in the same tourney are too slim to make it worth the bother.

The much more likely explanation is that BB had several tables going, or wasn't paying attention properly for some other reason, and didn't realise the pot odds and how short HJ was. It's a commonly used angle shoot in online play, when your stack is super short, to minraise pre and save a handful of chips for the flop to give your opponent a second chance to fold.

I've been on both ends of identical situations several times, both getting someone else to fold, and accidentally folding to a tiny bet, and none of those were in any way collusion.


Occam's razor ftw!

^^

there were only 35ish ppl in this tourney only.

it was limit.

the only fold i see normally in that situation is a disconnect or timeout fold.