Hello,
i didnt read al the thread but i want to explain what happened in Italy (yes, there's someone who play poker here ).
First of all in Italy pokerrooms cant freeze account more than X days and they HAVE TO UNLOCK MONEY, in every case they have to give money to the player even if he did multiaccount collusion etc.

This is a stupid rule and lots of people use this to their vantage.
We have got 250€ limit buyin (6 mtt >100€ during the week), the number of mtt "highstakes" (lol) is really low. If u play 30 mtt/day u have to play 10€ too with ABI 45-50€.

Some good regs tried to increase this ABI with MultiAccount. They could play x2 or x3 some sunday tournament with a 70-80% ROI (lol)...

At the begin the % of the multiacounter were low, but in few month the growth was unreal...
In tounaments with 100 150 players having 2 account under 1 controller is not so difficult.

Everybody knew this ****, cause we are in this "ghetto" dot it and everybody knos everybody, but nobody was trying to do something.

At this point some fed regs trying to complete a list with the name of the multiaccounte and pubblished it. Obv you all can mind the reaction of the multiaccounter etc: denials & threats.

Results:
- lots of the regs who complete the list give it up cause one of his friend was in the list
- rooms could do nothig because the 2nd account owner was the girlfriend which lives with him
- Multiaccounter quit the 2nd account and opened one more account and nobody knows
- In The sunday million FT (we have got just twice in a year) we had 3 Multiaccounter
- Pokerstars denounced one of them but nobody know what's going on
- Fishs now hate their "idol" and doesen't want to play in "this ****"
- Multiaccounters are still sponsorized and live a quiet life

I wont write about ghosting because this is legal in dot it, but suks too.

Sorry about my english and maybe u dont care about ours problems but i wanted to tell you all what happened in Italy

True as far as the feed-the-family argument goes. But i guess the point is that some people resort to these means not to gain an advantage but because of a law that no-one here agrees with.

tbh, 'problems' like this are quite impossible to fix. it happens all the time, and the only way to stop it, would have a massive impact on your privacy.

post of the thread (besides Kleaths obv).

.

did this canadian vpn ringleader win the millionaire maker ?

You didn't have to sacrifice anything, the US govt didn't put a gun to your head and tell you to go live in mexico to play pokers, that was your choice. You could have stayed in the states and played live or took up a diff occupation. The chances are, that a good proportion of the relocated US regs will end up moving back home because it will be tough to grind it out in a foreign country and away from family and friends. Unless you are cleaning up money wise online, then it probably isn't worth it in the long run for all the sacrifices.

An american calling euros fools, made my day. Also, the US and A throw peeps into jail for less than that.
I don't even know where to start to comment on the rest.

Yeah cause you know what its like and all.

I moved to Rosarito voluntarily a year ago from Finland (we have zero gaming restrictions I just wanted to move randomly). I faced zero of your problems and I am one large idiot when I'm drunk, and spent a lot of time wandering the streets Tijuana, Ensenada, etc drunk like a monkey. I suspect that whatever problems you had were self-caused.

Not to say that I don't sympathise with US regs that had to move for BF. I definitely do. But it doesn't all have to be bad, life is what you make of it, and it can actually be pretty eye-opening for many people (especially close-minded Americans which the poster quoted above seems to be a typical example of) to get to see new places and experience new cultures. Move to Playa del Carmen and you'll have 20x more fun than you ever had living at the States. You can even play beer pong with other Americans and watch NFL on tv eating hot dogs! What Katie wrote about 100 posts back actually sounded very relatable to me and I felt bad just reading it, but what LeonP wrote just makes me tilted as he sounds like the typical American 22 year old who thinks America is the only place on earth worth living in. You're young, you have a flexible job, you don't have commitments, go explore ffs. You can live for the price of 10 Denny's meals for a month in lots of amazing countries, if you can't afford that with your poker earnings maybe you should consider going back to school anyway.


Regards,

Euro fool.

Of course black friday sucked massively and it's a terrible situation for every US reg, I'm not trying to say that at all. But the more I think about it and read people's opinions, the more I agree with the views Deoxyribo and others posted. In a perfect world every remote controler and vpner on Stars would get caught, but none of them are getting caught anyway, so there's not much point discussing individual people and we should concentrate on large-scale operations.

Anyway, I think it's a pretty moot point arguing about whether the US regs remote controling from the States should be punished or not. Half of them do it anyway and at their own risk. This is Stars' problem, as long as they are incapable of stopping it from happening, it's pointless to snitch half of everyone's facebook friends for that as long as they play on their own account.

LOL

All mud slinging aside, usually people that say this are pretty uncultured and have never been to the places they hate on.

+1

Don't get me wrong hoody, I like the states and most of the citizens are great. Chuck described it pretty well in the post above. My english is just to bad to form sentences like that

You dropped out of college to play poker yet cant afford to live anywhere else except mexcio? sounds like you ****ed up somewhere

Yes the american government ****ed all americans over but what no reg or person wants to admit is that they themselves ****ed up and left/put themselves in spots that arent desirable. You cant just blame the govt forever and not take any blame for not grinding enough/making a good enough career choice or whatever.

Obv I am not american so all the americans are gonna flame but whatever

No one is forced to make a sacrifice for poker, its a choice and you should realize every choice has upside and downside

No one put a gun to anyones head

So another simple example:

Your John Doe living in whatever city and you make $100,000 per year. Carrots have been outlawed in this city because the mayor hated them as a child. A Carrot dealer moves into your neighbourhood, illegally peddling Carrots. there are no other negative side effects of him being there (crime, etc.). Would you care because what he is doing is illegal? No, probably not, you think it's ridiculous that carrots are banned and don't think he is hurting anybody so you let it be.

What now if having a carrot dealer in your neighbourhood caused your pay to be reduced from $100k/yr to $80k/yr, would you care then? You still don't care he is peddling carrots, or think it's wrong, but now you'll probably say "!@_$( that Carrot dealer, I don't think what's he doing is wrong but I also don't OWE him anything to where I should sacrifice 20%+ of my income just so he can sell carrots".


That's my view on the regs VPN'ing :-p, and I don't see how people see it differently. I don't get why I'm supposed to "owe" these individual regs something and just sacrifice a ton of my income so they can relax from their couch at home with their family while i'm getting anal 1@$)*(d by my Govt. and in another country. If I wasn't playing poker, or it didn't affect me... I wouldn't care, but it does, it costs me tens of thousands of dollars a year, maybe more just to let them play from home and there is no real reason why I or anybody else is obligated to let them do that. Why does the community think there is?

Maybe I have finally found my calling....

PrimordialAA,


I agree with your view, but I'd like to stress out that it's also not the community's job to catch these people. It's Stars/FTP's fault, and it happens on these sites by far more than on any other sites, and out of the hundreds (thousands?) of people doing it they have caught ~0. We all have friends who are doing it, even I have friends who are doing it and I'm not even American, and it's a pretty ugly spot to put anyone in expecting them to out their friends as long as they are playing on their own accounts (=not gaining unfair edges beyond being able to play from home). I'm 100% NOT suggesting that this should be accepted as a community. Of course it should not be. But I don't know what you expect the community to do, everyone to rat out half of their Facebook? And how would you prove it anyway?

I think it should be our goal to make Stars realize how big this problem is, first and foremost. To do this, I think my goal as someone attending the meetings, should be to ensure they understand how much of all the things mentioned itt are happening, and (try to) act on it. To do this I'm going to present them all the evidence I've been able to gain in a chewable form.

And then as a semi-separate subject there are the rings, backing operations etc running that has a couple of greedy guys backing 50 people from USA with their remote controls. These need to stop asap imo because obviously this is 50 times worse than a single guy VPNing. I'm doing my best to get these people caught, and with the help of some others and we've already emailed Stars all we have on them. But regarding individual players, we can argue whether it should be accepted or not until the world's end, but the fact is that every single poster here knows dozens of people who have been or are VPNing from their couch at the USA and to my knowledge zero of them have chosen to snitch one. I'm sure everyone myself included would largely prefer that Stars caught them so we could get more profits, but as long as they are not catching them, blame them. That's what I'm trying to do as well.

As a side note, if the authorities licensing Stars atm knew about the scale of their security leaks I'm pretty sure they'd get shut down again, lol. I'm not sure how wise it is to even discuss this since that would obviously be even more bad.

Come on Leon let's be ****ing real here. You mean 20 times in a Tijuana jail!

As far as the thread it's prob not a good read for recreational players which frequent this site much more then you would think but if there is a massive backing ghosting team play rings going on and who knows what else (Barcelona) which we all know is impossible cause money doesn't attract criminal organizations at all but if there were rings like this going on then I would say this thread would be a pretty good deterrent to the rings to tone it down a bit and a big wake up call to some of the sites to bring some mother ****ing heat on these organized criminal enterprises before it kills off the sites which it will be highly inevitable in the long term. This in itself will also act as a deterrent to future shenanigans.

I think sites could easily uncover any rings going on if they put together a list themselves of who is backed by whom then data crunch the **** out of all hand histories. I'm pretty sure it would stick out like a sore thumb which backing groups are tinged by criminal element.

Even though it will probably never happen, I would love a detailed list of who plays for who. I would actually pay someone for a list like this.

I'll bet you would have a different point of view if the major online poker sites were forced out of Europe rather than the US.

but you are suggesting it should be accepted, your saying everyone should be totally fine with giving up a huge % of their income in hopes that stars eventually finds a way to deal with a problem that experts are creating ways around it. there are ways that stars 100% can never ever catch, I could describe a solution right now that has a 0% chance of ever being detected, there is just only so much stars can do, and it's a lot harder to make a system that catches ALL forms trying to go around it, than it is to rapidly make new ways to get around it. I don't see how you and everyone else is OK with just giving up infinite $ as a community to people unwilling to move. I guess we all should just go back home and VPN, why the f*** did I take 2 years off of poker after black friday, cost myself close to $1M in EV for the option to stay with my family and let my wife finish getting her citizenship. It's just ******ed, if you want to play on PS/FTP pack your bags, and move to a country you can afford to live in. There is a 0% chance you can't find a place to move that is significantly cheaper than your living situation now in the states anyways, and if you can't afford to move (cost of a plane ticket + 1 months living expense) then you probably should stop playing poker anyways. It's just ridiculous lol, I don't see how these people deserve all the upside they are getting for just being to lazy to move, if you dont want to sacrifice something you don't deserve to take hundreds of thousands of the economy I've given a lot to have access to every year.

Why? I'm from the states as are you and I have his exact viewpoint

nice,
u are too dumb to succeed in college and now ur wining that u have to move to another country, it's not like pursue poker was a 100% safe decision so gl with ur job (or vpn )

Primordial.. it seems like you've had to sacrifice a lot to make this move, may I ask why you didnt decide to take the VPN route yourself?

well not really because I am Canadian but if Canada did shutdown online poker i would have no problem with relocating to wherever I wanted and prolly would save money in the process

They don't deserve to have any of that, but again, what solution are you suggesting? That everyone just starts snitching on their friends? Ok boys, who wants to start? I promise to snitch on 1 person for each person any of the other 500 ppl here who have vpning friends do.

And what does it even help? I send Stars an email that hey yo this player X won Y tournament playing from the States. They look at their records and it shows to them that he was in BC or Rosarito or whatever. There's like 3% chance they even catch the guy.

And even if they do somehow catch him, then what? He'll have some $ confiscated, but being smart he doesn't have most of his networth on his Stars account anyway, so he can just buy a new account from these rings and Start fresh being idvalentina2 and no one knows who he is. That's even worse than before.

Like I said I'd LOVE for there to be a solution that would help us get rid of all the US vpners. But it's so huge that I don't see it happening, and the only authority that can possibly make it happen is Stars. There's only so much we can do and I still think that the best bet is to make them aware of the size of this problem and give them some examples of the rings in operation. Of which I'd still love to receive more evidence.