Noah, Great great work!

How the **** could FTP security declare these accounts normal when the first allegations took place???

Looking forward to the stars/ftp response!

How is the softplay that you proved here cheating? I understand you have proven collusion, and that collusion is illegal, but how did it actually affect the bottom lines of these two players in specific situations that you think this had a negative impact on the bottom lines of other opponents? (in other words, cheating).

And why would anyone care whether two opponents softplay each other heads up in a cash game? I am not trying to hijack a thread with any arguments about it, I legitimately do not know any of this and I thought I knew poker.

I really tried but failed miserably to understand your point in the last paragraph.

This reminds me...Noah, the top 2% of hands is JJ+ according to Pokerstove. AK does not enter into it, not even AKs. If that makes any difference.

because what noahsd proved was not that they softplayed in heads up pots.

read creedofhubris's post in this thread (#49) for a good example of how the way they played could gain a direct advantage over the other players

also starrazz, before you clutter up this thread, please try to contain all your posts together rather than replying to each post in succession

You believe that they are deviating from how they would have played ordinarily based on an agreement they've made in advance (collusion). You don't believe they are gaining an advantage by doing so. Do you think there's no relationship between how you play your hands and how much money you make? Do you think that they are colluding in order to win less?

JJ-AA (24 combinations) is about 2% of hands. AA, KK, AK (28 combinations) is also about 2% of hands. What's your point?

incredible work

Does this mean Brice won't be playing poker any more, he did stake his poker reputation on this. I also think Taylor needs to explain if Nick has a vested interest in any companys he's involved in so people can decide if they want to continue to support them. I have directly asked Taylor to answer this question and he has declined, he has his lackies answer. Some major bs


I also think mason and all 2p2 mods owe everyone an apology for exposing us to a cheater, they endorsed him.

asdfjkl;

i mean come on. don't be naive. i am not commenting on this specific case here, but you just saying that all 'agreements' are collusion in the same way and of the same severity is absurd. it has probably happened a million times where two good friends are in the same game because it is a juicy game. those two friends have an 'agreement' not to go after each other, not in order to gain ANY advantage at all, but because they don't want to have to deal with taking each others money which could suck for the friendship and they would want to avoid what they perceived to be neutral EV variance with each other. this puts no one else at a disadvantage.

am i saying this is all that happened in this case? no, i am certainly not. i am just trying to make clear that not all things are equal. if two people are friends and knowingly play a certain way at the same table in order to either give a false image of their playing style or to manipulate specific pots in order to cheat a third party, then that is far far worse than two good friends sitting in a juicy game and simply trying to stay out of each others way.


and to play devils advocate even further, is it cheating when there isnt an outspoken arrangement but softplaying still occurs? say there is a huge fish in a 6max game and 5 good regs, and all five or at least some of those regs decide (without speaking) to basically all avoid each other while just trying to crush the fish. are they cheating?


reading through this i think there is definitely a good chance what they did was worse than purely staying out of each others way and they deserve repercussions from the site. that being said, i see a lot of pretty pathetic 2+2 group think where people are just so eager to be outraged by anything and get off to throwing someone in the mud so much that it is a little ridiculous. i guess humans love scandals. i think it is wrong to treat all violations of the rules equally. some violations that are committed deserve the wrath of the community and probably a good beat down while others are pretty meh in severity. sometimes intent plays a big part of this. i would never accuse guy liberate of 'cheating' by playing multiple accounts. his motivations and the way he went about it are just as significant as the simple fact that he multi-accounted. the fact that he didn't do it to gain advantage on unknowing third parties DOES matter.

with that said, i do think this case sounds like somewhere between just friends avoiding each other and actual direct collusion to manipulate pots or give a false image and should be treated as such. what noah has done is great, and he deserves the praise he has gotten.

You're wrong about everything other than the fact that this has happened a million times. An agreement to stay out of each other's way in a juicy game confers an advantage. For example, each friend can open looser with the other friend left to act, knowing that he's not going to be exploited for his loose play by his buddy and will get to play extra pots with the fish. In fact, this is really, really similar to what stox and littlezen did. In a fair game, there are no friends at the table.

edit: Ok, I can acknowledge that this sort of collusion can range in severity. Agreeing to stay out of each other's way is not as bad as actively squeezing other players or sharing hole cards.

The lack of an agreement makes all the difference, in terms of cheating or collusion. It's still a sketchy situation but it's hard to claim anyone is cheating.

To go back to the stox/zen case, I think the extreme nature of the pattern Noah shows combined with the clarity of the fact that these players are knowingly playing in a suboptimal way against eachother combined with the very large sample of hands over which it occurs combined with the fact that the two definitely know eachother IRL are sufficient to infer the existence of an explicit agreement even in the absence of direct evidence.

what? of course it does. simple example, if youre in the CO and your friend is BTN, you can raise a wider range knowing your "friend" is not going to be 3betting you lightly.

having an "agreement" between your friend is certainly different than if it was simply a reg you knew was a nit who didnt 3bet lightly.

If you agree that they colluded, it's almost beside the point whether or not they gained an advantage, although I don't think it's very hard to show that they did.

The difference between gaining an advantage by colluding and failing to gain an advantage by colluding is the difference between cheating well and cheating poorly. Collusion = cheating.

What you're saying is a bit like demanding evidence that a corked bat will detectably improve a batter's performance before taking action against someone caught with a corked bat.

i hope it is clear that you were by no means who i was talking about when i speak of 2+2's common phony outrage that people just loooove to engage in. i have no large issues with what you are saying, but i do think an arrangement to stay out of each others way and simply that is just not that morally outrageous. to be totally honest, i have played some hands with these guys and deep down in my gut i can't really say i feel truly 'cheated'. i do think your argument is compelling regarding opening wider knowing he won't 3bet you, but if nothing else, that is relatively minor if that is the greatest implication.

again, i also do think it seems they must have had an agreement that went slightly beyond simply, 'hey, let's avoid each other, i don;t want to have big swings with my friend'.

you think he'll be here to respond?

It's also similar to the Spygate Scandal involving the New England Patriots a few years back. "But it didn't confer an advantage," their fans had cried, using of course words less esoteric than confer. What matters most of all is whether or not the parties involved violated the rules of the game. In other words did they cheat? It is clearly illogical to after the fact deny cheaters culpability because the critic personally cannot understand the advantages gained. Arguments can be made that the behavior is so benign that it should not qualify as "cheating," but it is nevertheless cheating as it was understood to be cheating at the time of the infraction.

thanks for doing this noah. looking forward to sitting down and reading this when I have some time in a couple weeks, but either way it's awesome how much effort you put into this

This might be an example, but it's not really clear, how much of a big deal it is EV-wise. Consider that you're only looking at cases where

- everyone before CO has folded
- BTN has a hand that he would have opened had CO folded but chooses to fold now since CO opened
- SB or BB have a hand that is precisely such that it would CC or 3! a Btn open but not a (perceived) stronger CO open.

There is then the possible 2nd order issue of a misconception of COs seemingly stronger range in the eyes of SB/BB on certain textures.

All in all seems to be a relatively rare scenario.

i just think people are a little hypocrite here. i mean people were jumping at him for having 3 account where he played like 100k hands on and claimed he got an unfair advantage from this. i mean professional players usually depend on either clueless people or degenerated gamblers to make money, high ethical standards seem out of line here imo.

Poker, especially high stakes 6max played with 20BB is a game of very small edges. These guys made about a million dollars beating the games for under 2bb/100. A very small edge, illicitly gained, is a very, very big deal.

The amount of work put into this investigation is simply astounding. People like Noah and others who assisted in this case, people like jalex in the prop bet thread in bbv, those who investigated the UB/AP scandals, and plenty others I'm sure, deserve a huge amount of respect and appreciation. They take a huge amount of their time to help and protect the poker community for very little/no reward. Although I have no personal interest in the actions of stoxtrader and the rest as many in hsnl do, I just wanted to add my thanks to Noah and those who helped him

All,
This has nothing to do with the collusion in HU pots controversy. The collusion that I found happened preflop in pots where neither player was the big blind, so there were always other players in the pot.

Drew,
That's definitely not how refunds should work. I have no idea whether or not people will get a refund or how stars/FTP would do it if they did, but looking at how much money you made/lost against those players or while those players were at the table is not a good way to do refunds.

I think even AP/UB used a better way than that... tho not totally sure.

Baluga,
Looks like they misunderstood your e-mail, but that's not important. They know about it already.

starazz,
Does this post clarify why this is cheating and gave them an edge: http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/sh...6&postcount=50 ? If that doesn't clarify it for you, then maybe accept the fact that not a single HSNL regular has questioned that softplaying is cheating because they all understand that it is. If that doesn't satisfy you, wait a couple days and I might have a nice numerical answer to what edge this gave them. I understand that it's a little annoying that people don't want to talk about this stuff very explicitly, but it should be pretty obvious that detailing how cheating works is something we like to avoid doing.

Also, do you really wanna debate whether AK is a stronger hand than JJ with 20 BBs? I think we can broth agree that he was mucking hands as strong as TT on average and we can both agree that that's pretty weird. Hopefully if you read my post above, you'll understand that weird = cheating in this case, and then who cares if he cheated by shipping JJ+ or AK/KK+?

insideman,
Please read the first paragraph of my response to starazz. This did give them an advantage.

I think your general point that there's some grey area here definitely has some merit, but I think maybe this will satisfy you:

If two buddies open up Stars accounts, sit down for the first time with each other and decide to stay out of each other's way, they obviously shouldn't have their accounts locked. Stars should give them a warning--letting them know that that's actually against the rules and they shouldn't do it again--and maybe do something nice to compensate the other players at the table.

If two professional poker players play hundreds of thousands of hands of mid/high stakes in which they systematically stay out of each other's way to give themselves an advantage, they should have accounts locked and money confiscated and their opponents should be compensated fairly (out of pocket if the site was unable to stop the money from being withdrawn).

As far as I know, Stars has had this policy with lots of kinds of cheating for a while now. For example, in low stakes sit + gos, it's not too uncommon for players to openly discuss colluding in chat because they don't know it's against the rules. I think Stars pretty much always gives these players a warning. But if two professionals colluded in sit + gos, they'd obv lose their money.

I don't know where to draw the line in each individual case, but Stars has been drawing such lines for a while and it seems to work out ok (when they catch people at least...).

if they were outed last year when the collusion discussion began , wouldnt this throw up a red flag and they might have stopped ?

or the sites said it was ok to them? maybe they cleared it with the sites.

Put it in the first post. Is what I added good?

I would think so too, but it's clear from the data that it continued after March '09.

Edit: ike,
TY. Looks good.

Ok so question for the group....

Russ Hamilton > Stoxtrader

Stoxtrader > Russ Hamilton

?