DonJuan- I think you're vastly underestimating how much damage they caused. It was far more then just Blind v. Blind. Looking through my hands with them its obv they were playing best hand also. Maybe not 100% of the time, but a lot. I have VERY few hands where they both put money into the pot voluntarily. Therefore, they never got trapped in hands as the third man in, which also cost bets they would have paid off and created smaller pots (VPPS).

Does anyone know a way I can sort in Ptracker to see how many times two players both voluntarily put money in the pot together? I'm just looking over it with the naked eye, but would love to compare some numbers.

Anyway, everyone's getting too sidetracked on how they cheated, how much they cheated, etc. That part is case closed. Pokerstars said they cheated, they admitted to cheating, money was confiscated, and money was refunded (incorrectly), so there's really no need to keep going over it. The main issue is is how the refunds were handled

+

The thing is that we have no real way of knowing how much was refunded and to whom. Who knows if Stars figured in the value of the cheaters' tourney packages or their fpps into the compensation pool? Who knows if all the cash was refunded? Only a small dollar amount of the refund pool has been accounted for in this thread.

In the past Stars could typically be counted on to go above and beyond the call in situations like this. As has been mentioned in this thread, that tradition seems to have taken a major hit in 2010 and Stars doesn't seem to handle a crisis in anywhere near the competent manner they once did. That they have don't deign to even acknowledge this thread is but one small sign that Stars may not still be the same service oriented organization they once were.

We have had only one person ITT claim to get a refund and he didn't even seem sure if it was from this. I'm very skeptical that they payed out even a fraction of what they should have, and goes knows to whom.

Yeah Stars has actually been sliding for quite some time now. It's like they forgot what got them to number #1 and it's all gone downhill. They are very foolish if they think they can provide this level of poor service and still maintain their spot. They have already lost a lot of the market share to Full Tilt and I'd imagine it will continue. It seems like the people in charge are so greedy that they are trying to squeeze every last dime out of us. It's a shame how fast they've gone downhill.

I got a small refund which I'm pretty sure was from this. I hadnt played a huge amount against these players but it probably added up over the years.

Wow, gl all involved.

To being playing in an unfair environment is pretty sick, especially for such a long period (I read 750k hands?). It's hard for them to keep 100% of the rake when PS didn't provide a safe environment. It's hardly like they have to take it out of their (PS') pockets, only out of their projected income. It's even more rediculous that they treat it as though "**** happens" (with how they are refunding).

Here's an excerp from one of the emails to Furbean from PS(http://www.furbean.com/my_apology.php #5)

As was pointed out in the other thread about them (I think Supernova Elite Pursuit thread), their argument was that part of this was to help the hands go faster and to save time...but obviously it's pretty LOL to hold up the games to make a freaking phone call in one's efforts to speed up the games.

I mean, MAYBE they could argue that all the other folds they do where they would have contributed to longer hands would have outweighed the delays on the phone-call hands. But it's still incredibly ridiculous.

They just wanted to reduce their variance. They wanted to get out of each other's way so they could count on that and thus focus on the other players at the table.

Whole thing in general isn't really uncommon. People soft-play their friends all the time because they just wanted to be nice. This was way more organized of course. But when it's done it's not an issue of trying to speed things up. It's just not wanting to play each other.

There's a guy I know on Stars who I have a transfer history with who I fully expect to come at me hard and vice-versa. I mean, we COULD soft-play each other if we wanted to and it would probably help both of our win-rates in the end.

I have to think there are lots of other people who let their friends off the hook sometimes at the river especially if he's been whining to him about how bad he's been running lately, etc. It's not uncommon and I don't think there's much that can be done to spot that kind of spontaneous soft-play.

But I expect even those types of players who even know each other to have a SD% of higher than 0 and to not call each other in the middle of the damn hand to ask, "Okay...do you have KK? No? Okay...great! Isn't it awesome how we're speeding up the play on Stars?!?!?!"

Not to mention that furbean self describes himself as a Berkeley computer engineering grad. If that's true, I'm guessing that he could manage a slightly more efficient communication method than a phone call.

Since the phone call scenario badly strains credibility, it dawned on me that Stars does have a potentially mitigating angle in this. furbean could easily be exaggerating the amount seized from his and fua's account and it's possible, maybe even likely, that they had nowhere near the amount described. Objective data, like from PTR, don't exactly show the two of them posting impressive results so it would stand to reason that they may not keep as money in their account as they claimed. Being that they were damned, dirty cheaters they may have been even less motivated to keep the accounts fully topped off.

all reasonable points.

Do remember that they were both Elites and thus earning 5x FPP's. So even as break-even players they were racking up the points and bonuses pretty fast. On 20 freaking tables at 5/10 limit I would have to think they were perhaps over 1k VPP's an hour.

An SNE earning 5x FPP's is going to get about $140k for their 1M VPP's I believe which is $140 for 1k VPP's. So they're probably over $150/hr just from the rakeback stuff while generally playing break-even poker and it really wouldn't surprise me if they were closer to $200/hr (maybe 1200-1500 VPP's per hour or something).

No, it's not the highest hourly rate in the history of the internet. But they were still pulling in the dough pretty well if my instincts on their VPP rate are correct.

Methinks PokerStars will just ignore this thread.

It's been 7 days since I filed a formal complaint to the Isle of Man Gaming Commission. No response yet, not even an acknowledgment that they received it. Must be a tight ship they're running over there.

No offense but complaining to these fake gaming commissions has to be a huge waste of time.

Agree that it's probably next to useless, but it just takes a minute to right an e-mail. I'm sure it's probably as big of a joke as the whole UB/Kahnawake Gaming Commission relationship.

Quick Update- I finally received a response back from one of the "Gaming Inspectors" which basically said the same thing Stars did. He said that since I won money from them, he didn't see what the problem was. I further explained the situation to him and pointed to this thread, to which he responded that he'll look into it further. That was 10 days ago. Nothing since. I would post the e-mails he sent but he asked me not to. They basically read just like the stars e-mail sent, so you're not missing much.

Oddly I received an e-mail from stars with my last 40,000 hand histories a couple days ago even though I never requested it. In fact, I hadn't logged in to Stars for days. When I questioned them about it, they said they mistakenly sent it to me. They said they were downloading these hand histories to review my complaint to the Gaming Commission, and accidentally clicked the wrong button which sent them to me.

Anyway, I've since moved almost 100% of my play away from Stars and feel pretty good about it.

sick thread, never saw this till I was linked here from the botting.

Has anyone received credits from these LHE cheaters on Stars??

The answer is no.

They eventually paid out on the Don players, because they made more noise.

Many of the LHE players must be completely unaware of this thread.

Why didn't we at least get compensated for the lost VPPs like the Dons did?

Moral is: Pokerstars will do the right thing, only if the right people make enough fuss, otherwise you get FA.

Yep this thread is shorter since LHE is such a smaller player pool. Of course if it's DON's or NLHE or SNGs or something this would have been taken care of because there would have been much more pressure. But thats pretty much their status quo now. They just try to reactively fix problems and hope it quiets the masses. I think actually doing the 'right' thing went out the window with them a long time ago.

I filed a formal complaint with the 'gaming commission' and e-mailed stars numerous times, I will also never recommend them again to anyone who seeks my advice on where to play (which happens pretty frequently)so that's pretty much all I can do. They have been such a miserable failure in my eyes and have shown how poorly they treat their customers that I have taken my business elsewhere, which has worked out great for me, so maybe it was a blessing in disguise that I finally saw this company for what they really are.

oh sick, there's a site with a more generous refund policy than stars? what is it?

It must be the one where all trolls get a special invite. So why don't you name it here?

IIRC it was called SHILL ACCOUNT POKER

I've not read the whole thread, but my post is just a little up the page, I received a small refund from them.