they can't tell every single time but if hero allways keep the same couple of players alive in that situation and pushes against other bubbles they will know.
it's ok to softplay even when it's not +EV (where the player might think it's +EV or he's just scared) but it's not ok if you allways do it against the same player(s).

i feel like everyone was cheating in these things neways. i always saw douchebags in starbucks and **** playing together and itd make sense to do it in one of these games. pathetic and glad they are gone!

so not a single person wants to sign this?

No flies on you

obv not, dons are a disgrace

shut them dons down!

get the **** out of here, shut down dons asap

--> bring normal rake structure on nongay sngs

Hating DONs right now..

DoN-haters ITT!!!

[a fellow DoN-hater] Juk

+1

I don't get this argument. If the correct play in a spot like that is to fold to keep the bubble going (seems reasonable), then doing that wouldn't be collusion. So, what's the problem with that?

If, however, a player varies his play in spots like this based on who's at the table, then that could very well be collusion. For example, if he only calls in spots like this when his buddy is at the table--that's collusion.



Anyway, in general, collusion is going to be easier to detect in 50/50s because it is necessary more blatant in 50/50s.

In a DoN, there are lots of spots where you have very little control over your own equity but lots of control over other players' equity. The spot that you quoted in your post is a great example. Obviously these spots are ripe for collusion, but they're also difficult for Stars security. Since a player has no real incentive to make any specific play, he might make plays that look like collusion because he thought it would be funny or because he wanted to play longer or because the wind was blowing in a specific direction. He might do it because he doesn't like somebody else, and as this thread shows, it's sorta hard to tell if that's collusion or not.

In a 50/50, there's no similar problem because you always have a monetary incentive to play in a way that you feel is correct. There will be much less random clicking of buttons with a deep stack on the bubble. That makes things easier to analyze because there's much less noise and more signal. It also takes a lot of the merit away from the excuse "I felt like doing that" since it necessarily becomes "I felt like doing that so much that I was willing to give up $x to click that button."


I suppose the primary reason that Stars prefers 50/50s is simply because collusion is less profitable in them, and therefore will be less common and hurt legitimate players much less. I'm sure they're also pretty happy that whatever collusion does occur in them will be easier to detect. I'm sure that they're not happy to be taking away games that people want to play because it's giving them fairly significant bad press and because it will probably cost them money (in spite of the higher rake in 50/50s). Presumably they thought that this was worth it, and my guess is that the major reason that they did this is because they didn't like the risk of rampant, extremely profitable, hard-to-detect collusion. I would've guessed that even if they didn't mention collusion in their announcement. Frankly, I'm pretty surprised that they did.

I wonder if they'll make similar changes to satellites.

The problem is that it's never going to be correct to keep the bubble alive 100% of the time. Therefore it would take a massive sample size to see if a player is colluding with someone else at the table by not keeping the bubble alive or if the player is just adjusting to table dynamics. It gets even more complicated if we the number 2 stack starts keeping the bubble alive in certain situations. As a player it will be extremely difficult to tell if you are being colluded against. With hole card info and a detailed understanding of the game, stars should be able to detect collusion after a very large sample. However, I highly doubt that stars security is competent enough for this. The majority of the DON collusion was originally detected by players. The keeping the bubble alive scenario is only scratching the surface of new ways to collude imo.

Also note that stars' default collusion email says that they look for the following:

"1) Best hand play - where colluding players play only the better of their
two hands.

2) Soft play - where colluding players refuse to play aggressively against
each other. For example they may check or fold against each other where
they would normally bet or raise against a stranger.

3) Chip dumping/Stack balancing - where the large stack folds to the small
stack to balance their chips. The idea is to improve the chances of both
players finishing in money positions in a tournament."

In fifty50s, none of these have to be used in order to collude. I emailed stars about a collusion concern in a fifty50 and they said they looked for the same things.

1.donregs=

2.muahahahaha weeeeeeeeeeeeee yeeeeeehaaaa hahahaha heeeellll yeaaaaaahhh etc etc etc

3.leave the 1$ collude or nothings till rs3 has his 1mill games!!!!!!!!!!!!!


4. see pic above weeeeeeeeeeee

Playing poker is a job for certain people so why clownklauen are you mean toward peoples who lost their job since their department(DoN specialization) are closing.

Just seeing this kind of attitude toward others i doubt PPA will be able to unite enough poker players to be successful in their endeavor.

Imagine if you worked as a gardener and had 20 customers per week and by doing these gardens you just earned a decent/liveable wage...

Then one day somebody came along and said: "hey, we're gonna take half your customers and give them to this guy, but don't be sad because you'll still have 10 customers left...".

How would you feel?

.
.
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I've nothing against DoNs or DoN players, but it sure does piss me off when a small site decides to split it's player pool in half by adding them...

Juk

meh we want dons gone man cheating filled games are worse for the games IMO

Don players were begging to have their player pool split in half if stars would just keep dons alive. Regs want fish to be happy and so far it seems that more fish are playing dons than playing fifty50s. It's not that don players are cry babies. It's just that they want a very popular (for regs and fish) format to be offered. Your player pool was split because dons were very popular. Dons are being totally destroyed because stars' security is incompetent. Big difference.

No, it's that you're crybabies. Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah cry more because we are delighted to see the back of the colludeornothings.

I'm actually pleasantly surprised with the amount of DoNs running on the Merge Network currently and strongly considering a move. The only problem is most of them are 6-max instead of 10-max, but beggars can't be choosers. $5 and $10 players should have no issues playing all the tables they want during normal hours and currently there are 9 $20s, 4 $30s, 1 $54, and 2 $84s running for 6-max. I'd imagine there might be a couple Stars regs who migrate over once DoNs are officially gone from Stars, so those numbers should go up even further. Also, with enough volume, rakeback deals on RPM and Carbon are almost on par with SNE and in some cases better.

Game security and customer service will be worse than Stars, but I guess it's a tradeoff for what I imagine are softer games and actually being able to play DoNs.

I used to grind the $10 and $20 DoN's on stars, moved to merge and now play on carbon, love it so far, only thing is the rake is a lot higher than it was on stars for the turbo DoN's. Its basically double. Granted levels are longer..etc. Really like carbon/merge overall though, been a good transition

DONs will be gone soon!!

b/c he is an uneducated flamer

bottom line is that stars should offer the games the players want to play period. End of story

I've been longing for this day ever since they first introdiced DONs and divided the player pool.
This made it impossible for me to play on party, ongame and ipoker. And I had to move to either stars who had enough traffic or tilt who did not offer dons.
Now it is the opposite for you guys... sucks I guess.

But personally I hope Party, Ongame and Ipoker follow so I once again can choose to play on european sites.