Hello everyone. Many MTT players may have encountered me at the tables in 100+ tournaments under the nicknames Hofr on PS, GodspeedYou! on GG, and ArkaduktusFrRM on WPN. I am a member of Tyler's team, where I serve as one of the main coaches, and I also lead my group within the RSB team. People who have interacted with me can vouch for the fact that poker is my passion. I literally live and breathe poker because I don't excel at anything else like I do in Hold'em.
Therefore, it was particularly strange and unpleasant for me to find myself in the position GGPoker put me in. I got banned for something related to remote desktops, screen-sharing programs, and emulators. They took this action without providing any explanations, evidence, instances of suspicious hands, or proof of my use of prohibited software. Moreover, even GGPoker itself hasn't definitively decided whether I am a cheater, as they allowed me to withdraw all my funds.
Despite my strong belief in my innocence and my readiness to provide any evidence to support it, I was met with a flat denial, with GGPoker stating that their decision is final.
Such decisions cast doubt on the security of any of us - members of the poker community. Because if today they can simply come and ban a fairly well-known player who plays at a significant stake, then tomorrow, similar measures could affect any of you. Anyone who decides to stream their game to friends via Discord, anyone who runs OBS, opens a remote server alongside a working client even without active tables, or just accidentally gets caught in the trap of poorly functioning algorithms.
I understand that many of you who don't know me personally might hesitate to vouch for my honesty, or whether I use any cheating aids as GGPoker accuses. But I am willing to undergo any checks, demonstrate my level of competence to anyone, record a session with ten cameras, and explain any of my actions to a person with the necessary expertise to assess whether I am an honest player.
As a precautionary note, let me clarify that I play all my sessions simultaneously on the three aforementioned poker rooms, which already significantly complicates the use of any prohibited software. Additionally, my Sharkscope graph, which serves as undeniable proof of my skills, is open to everyone and contains all the necessary information to observe my journey from the $30 ABI to the limits where I am currently playing.
Below, I am attaching a list of rules according to which GGPoker issued a ban to me. Since they did not specify the exact reason for the blocking, I can only speculate. For educational purposes for myself and my students, I use a server accessed through the "remote desktop" program. It is evident that I wouldn't risk using such tools during an active session. However, there is a possibility that I performed calculations before the session and, after closing the direct connection to the remote desktop, might have left the program itself running, which would still be listed in the task manager as "remote desktop" but wouldn't perform any direct functions. Alternatively, I might have gone to do some calculations after the session while leaving the GGPoker client open. For players who are not well-informed, I should add that even a 3-max calculation in Simple Postflop takes several minutes, and a calculation for a full table could take several hours, making it practically impossible to benefit from during regular play. On the GGPoker website, I have been playing for over three years, and the security service has the capability to track how many sessions I have played in total and how many of them were played with prohibited software running in parallel.
Now it remains only to classify the violation I committed in order to understand whether it deserves a ban or a freeze with verification according to GGPoker's rules. Among possible violations are:
Using RTA (Real-Time Assistance).
Multi-accounting.
Using bots.
The above-mentioned violations undoubtedly fall into the category of serious offenses and should result in a ban for the offending person. Can my violation be classified as one of the above? In my view, it cannot.
Let me clarify about RTA. Using RTA in MTTs is equivalent to suicide. On the same board, with the same stack sizes and positions, the frequency of continuation betting can vary from 0% to 100% depending on the ICM (Independent Chip Model) component, which includes the tournament stage, the other stacks at the table, and so on. Additionally, GGPoker or my opponents, who have sufficient statistics on me, have the right to analyze my database for compliance with GTO (Game Theory Optimal) strategies. I can assure you that almost none of my statistics align with the frequencies suggested by GTO.