Quote:
Originally Posted by KrachBummEnte
As for money lost against bots, I see the point of players freerolling, but there is still Stars responsibility of providing fair games and the chance that the bots never get caught. I understand that this is a bitter pill to swallow for Stars, but it's their own fault as they failed to provide what they are being paid for by the players.
In regards to Stars having no incentive to find bots - there should be outside regulators involved in security at Stars, assuring that this situation will not happen.
You can't just say "yeah don't pay back all the losses you are responsible for" because it costs them a lot.
Of course I accept that the sites have a duty to police the games properly and that we should get fair games. I also want the regulators involved but the priority has to be getting cleaner games. This means the regulator pushing sites to do more, monitoring their efforts, the cases investigated, the proportion caught by each site and at each site where the catching is done by the site rather than players.
Sites that don't do enough to catch cheats should be forced to by individual licence conditions added for them (to get to that we first have to get reporting in place BTW). This getting the regulator to demand reporting and proper resource on catching cheats is likely to be a significant additional regulatory cost for sites, even before we get to "fair" compensation. That cost ultimately comes from rake.
Just this week the UKGC have launched another discussion paper come consultation. This time on licence fees and how to charge sites. They go in to a lot of detail about what they spend the money on.
http://www.gamblingcommission.gov.uk...ting-fees.aspx
Issues like money laundering and match fixing, sporting integrity get multiple mentions. Match fixing stuff a special mention as a fixed cost due to the need to have in house expertise. The idea of the fees structure is that it should reflect the costs of regulating that operator/sector.
Poker gets no mention. Cheating is not mentioned. Prosecution gets one mention as a power, in a paragraph about how their strategy is to avoid the need to prosecute!
This may seem a bit rambling but I can see myself submitting to the consultation and saying that they have undercalled the work necessary for poker betting integrity, international liaison on that, reporting of it and yes the need to consider prosecution in multiple cases a year.
Now if you assume this needs full time staff and legal advice the poker cheating cost hit for the global regulator of poker is what? I'm not sure but I can't see it being change from £0.5m - This from a total budget of £13m. Call it 4% of the budget - they currently spend 6% on all "illegal enforcement" but that covers unlicenced gambling primarily. 6% is spent on "betting integrity". So it's pretty clear to me that doing a proper job on poker is a significant new cost they have not allowed for.
If they were to listen to me, then the result would be an increase in the casino licence fee, or worst case a supplementary poker fee, making poker less attractive to operators, adding costs on to players and potentially reducing competition further - it could have unintended consequences.
This is before we get to compensation - if sites that detect cheating have compensation rules enforced on them that guarantee that every time a cheat is caught they get a bill well beyond the rake from those games then the site has three options 1)not catch cheats (maybe even relaxing rules?) 2)stop dealing poker as it would become unprofitable 3) Increase the rake significantly.
Natural justice needs to be tempered with consideration of the impacts of unintended consequences.