On the topic of the seemingly new and growing trend of ghosting.

Ghosting is an issue for 2 fundamental reasons we can describe. First the ghost remains anonymous so our reads on the host become insignificant.

The second fundamental issue is although we are suspicious of certain players we often are never truly certain we are even being ghosted.

Players have been asking for solutions to the issue as everyones ev decreases and such an act is obviously bad for the game. I have many thoughts on the issue, and important ones I think. But I also see that the issue doesn't need to be as bad as it is. Also we should note that with respect to an economy 'ghosting' becomes more prevalent as the EV of cheating grows vs the EV of not cheating. A total solution would to bring the EV of the latter with respect to reducing the EV of the former, to a point in which ghosting no longer satisfies the motivation for doing so. EV in this case is not just winnings, but other motivations such as not being banished from the community etc.

In absence of a solution that completely satisfies this requirement, we still have some tools I think.

Vs. any player at the table there is an X% probability they are ghosting. If they are not possessed we should use our maximally exploitable strategy with respect to the most metagame perspective of villains strategy. If the player is possessed, yet we have no idea of the identity of the ghost (which is generally the nature and purpose of ghosting) our strategy should be complete balance for fear of being exploited and have very limited reads on our opponent (depending of course on the function of when we think ghosting took over).

Then we can see our current strategy vs player who is potentially possessed a non 0% amount of the time should lie some where between our non-possesed strategy and being completely balanced.

Obviously then we might suspect out of the x% chance a certain play might be possessed, we assign different weights to different levels of balance depending on the likely hood of the ghost being a certain player we suspect them to likely be.

In this we can start to see that in the future of pokers that includes a problem like ghosting, taking notes and doing research as well as developing strategy on reading the morality of player, might be quite helpful and +ev (immoral people cheat and moral people do not generally).

All the while acting immorally throughout the community, will cause players to seek unexpoloitable play vs the suspected ghoster.

There are many other things to extrapolate, like the higher likelihood of ghosting in higher stakes, since the motivation to cheat is likely higher we should consider moving towards balance more so than in lower stake games when all other factors are equal.