This is totally wrong in my experience.

Shortstackers live off dead money. They want to steal blinds and 3bet shove when they have high fold equity (against wide ranges). So the good ones are very positionally aware.

Hi Everyone:

Any other comments in this area would be appreciated. My understanding is that short stackers are looking to play mainly premium hands: the high pairs and the big aces, and perhaps some good Broadway combinations. So the better I can understand exactly what a good short stack strategy is, the more it will help me with my thinking concerning this issue.

Best wishes,
Mason

No, this is wrong. Optimal ranges for shortstacking from UTG is very tight (4-6%), optimal ranges from button is very wide (30%+).

If you take some observations (made over hundreds of million of hands): About 25+% of the time all fold to button (Average field statistic). Calculating NEQ for opening from the button vs SB and BB is relatively easy to calculate and this is a very wide range. Further, opening from the SB optimal range is even higher, and if you want to do it exploitive based on average field statistics it make sense (in my observation) to open with every possible hand.

Hi indianaV8:

Thanks. This is what I was looking for.

Best wishes,
Mason

seems like mason is starting a shortstacking/collusion/multiaccount gang with sklansky to replace stox

From what I hopefully understand now that is eluding some who have posted previously about "well i just want to steer clear of him because hes good etc..." (even with or without an actual mutual agreement of words by the parties involved) is that this is a mute point basically because these players are short stackers. It would almost be the same as a professional sng player not playing correct shoving ranges icm etc... because he wants to steer clear of someone. That just doesnt happen.

To me the above is a key point of the entire investigation and leads me to believe that the said parties are guilty of collusion. post 271, 272, and 273 itt explains it very well, and unless someone or the site investigators can come up with a reason or defense as to why the said posts mentioned are wrong, then I find it extremely difficult to believe that they were not colluding.

Wow. Hard to process all this information, but this is pretty good work by the person(s) responsible of gathering all the information.

Hey Noah,

Are you going to do some work on quantifying the possible edge gained from playing in this manner? The more I think about this the more I believe that this needs to be done.

I may be wrong, but IMO to have a sustainable edge playing like this you would need a coordinated effort to seat select(which would be easily spotted) and an environment where most of the regular had no idea what you were doing(any edge gained IMO would be easily adjusted to once the regs began to suspect something was up).

I think that 2p2 has a whole(myself included) has likely initially over estimated the possible advantage that soft playing in this fashion would yield.

Also, having a better idea of the incentive someone would have to collude will definitely give us better insight into likelihood that collusion did take place. Obv, this is not going to perfectly correlated, but it is additional data that should be given some weight.

just wanted to say good job Noah.

hm, I still dont understand if they did collude, why in such a way?I think its been mentioned before, that they could have made more by loosening up.
What I dont get is why they didnt play "honest" and when they lost Money to each other simply meet at the end of the month//year and give it back or something?
Maybe Iam biased but I sometimes think that the highstakes players on FTP could do this too since they know each other very well(dwan,urin,trex,omg e.g.)
Dont get me wrong, Im not accusing them, but I remember I talked about this with someone a long time ago who played midstakes and said hed never play ringgames on high stakes because of that possibility(even if he could//had the skill).

If they didnt softplay each other they would also have to leave tables more often (if that is how they play, double up and leave?) so that is an edge they gain.

Hi Noah, i dont know if this is possible with your data but think it would show something.
You know there openning %'s per position?
If player A has position on player B then:
Look at player A hands that get to showdown where player A has a premium hand. What is player B's openning % in these cases versus overall.

Great job Noah.

While the sites are re-doing their investigation, can they look at the pattern of cash transfers and cashouts of the players in question?

No cash transfers between the two would be fine, as it doesn't change anything. If there is a pattern of transfers, that should be looked at, and determined if it further supports the fact that collusion took place.

Interesting thought. According to PTR, LittleZen last played on April 1, 2010 and Kinetica last played on April 5, 2010 and appeared to have been playing daily previously.

Cash transfers between the accounts would be pretty useless information because

a) many of us use p2p-tranfers to quickly move money across sites (thus having a skewed balance wouldn't necessarily mean they're in fact colluding)

b) stox has stated openly in years past that after UIEGA he and a few close friends used to freely lend and borrow money among each other to lessen the amount each has to have online at any given time, thus decreasing the financial risk associated with having 100's of thou's of $ online.

I remember there was a big LIMIT holdem game on UB back in 2006 or so, I think it was 300/600. I remember hearing that stoxtrader won a ton of money at this game. Wondering if anyone still has these hands somehow to review?

I would like to see this addressed by Noah as well. As I am not familiar with SS strategy, I would imagine that two "professional" SS at the same table would have different dymanics based on seat selection in relation to themselves as well as deep stackers that they can exploit. Kyle brings up something that I don't believe was discussed in this thread yet. I would expect that the above mention PFRs in Mason's posts here would have to relate/adjust in relation to where the alleged people are sitting.

It would be interesting to analyze the records to see if they are legitimate loans as contrasted with multiple players playing out of the same roll and sharing the proceeds.

It seems to me that once you have solid evidence of collusive soft playing and admitted illegal multi-accounting, you need to take a hard look at other aspects such as hole card sharing and team playing.

I played in these games all the time. Unfortunately I still can't even get my hand histories back from UB even the hands I was knowingly cheated on. I got no real opinion on whether he colluded nothing ever seemed fishy to me, but then again if you are a player with good competence, nobody should be able to tell.

Yeah, and while we're at it we should get his high school exam papers too.....

Hi Kyle,
I've spent some time looking into this.

I can't quantify the exact edge that they gained for a long list of reasons.

I can prove pretty easily that they gained at least some edge simply by 3-betting each other with these tight ranges. In a 3-handed game with 20 BB stacks, I can even calculate this edge at somewhere between 0.1 and 0.2 BB/100. (I used knockstiff's BU open % and LittleZen's actual 3-bet % vs. knockstiff SB vs. BU to calculate this edge, and I had BB play as close to unexploitably as I could get.)

This is a huge underestimate because I ignored the edge they gained by cold calling, I assumed BB played perfectly, and I didn't add anything else they might've been doing because I haven't proved that they did anything else. (There are some simple things that they could've done in addition to 3-betting each other less that would've made the edge much much larger.) They also seem to have softplayed less extremely BU vs. SB than in other spots, which further lowers this estimate (and also is indicative of other types of collusion..).

Anyway, the point is that exactly what I've shown them to have done provided them with an unfair edge. Even though this is a huge underestimate, it's still not totally insignificant as it represents roughly a 5% increase in their combined profits when the two are at the same table together.

There's all this info, and in fairness its looking kinda strange, but out of all these hands has anybody got 1 hand history they can post that shows them playing in a "non standard" way?

Kind of hard to use hand histories to illustrate non-standard preflop folds.

Apologies if this is a bit naive and misunderstanding the issue - but is there absolutely no possibility they could be playing this way legitimately?

I have been thinking a bit about SSing recently. All of the books and forum stuff teaches an approach which is a one-to-two street game, designed to sacrifice EV with the aim of keeping beginners out of trouble. However, this only scratches the surface. With postflop skills, the strategic options open up. It might be correct to do things like cold-call monsters (particularly against other shorties), or call in the blind with the intention of making flop plays (check-raise, or stop-n-go, tourny style).

I'm not saying any of the above is correct. However, it may be the case that there are some counter-intuitive SS strategy that can lead to unusual statistics, particularly against other shorties. Now, stox and company may have figured this out between them, and are now applying it at the tables. This would not be different to any other poker players discussing strategy away from the table, and then later applying that strategy at the table.

The difference is whether the strategic changes are either A) generally applicable or B)specific to playing as a team. So I guess my question is, has this been definitively proven?

After all, with a very public trial, we should probably be assuming innocent before guilty (of this crime at least). Admittedly, they should be defending themselves. However, their absence again does not prove their guilt, it only implicates it. There may be legitimate reasons that they do not want to get embroiled further in the situation (In fact, if they have worked out some uber-SS-strategy, they have a very good reason to keep their lips very tightly pursed, and hope that everyone thinks they are cheating).

In their absence, there should at least be some voice acting as their defence. I'm not qualified. However, can a successful high-stakes SSer provide some guidance as to whether their strategic changes could in fact be generalisable?

They played a lot of CAP hands together. In CAP, everyone is a shortstacker with 30 BBs. So if it was a good idea not to reraise another shortstack preflop, then they should be playing in that fashion routinely in CAP. However, they only played that way vs each other. So it's clearly not something that they generalized.

True! there must be a still from the movie....photoshop ".if it weren't for those meddlin' 2p2 kiddies"