Completely disagree. You are not allowed to play on PokerStars from the USA for legal reasons. The only ones who bother to take the risk and hassle to circumnavigate these rules by VPN are winning players, recs do not bother. So VPN usage by USA based pros hurts the whole of the rest of the player pool by making the games (unfairly) tougher.

1) it's illegal
2) it contravenes the T&C of the site in question
3) when it's exposed, as Stinger is keen to point out, it perpetuates the impression of online poker as unregulatable and hence at the margin damages the campaign to bring online poker back to the us
4) as stinger points out, there are significant psychological advantages to playing at home surrounded by loved ones, over and above the cost involved in going overseas
5) as this situation reveals, it's not actually an option open to all, because name pros are more likely to be exposed, so it's not a level playing field

It's clearly less of a deal than deceiving other players about your identity, but I don't think it's NBD. There's also a parallel to the Girah scandal, wherein a genuine slippery slope unravelled itself from a series of minor, seemingly harmless steps across the line of commonly accepted/discussed poker behaviour.

To Brian's credit he shouldn't be held accountable for cheating dumb stuff he did when he was 21 years old, 26 years old, now, or in the future.

First, the, "it's the law argument," is, in fact a pretty big deal. As much as I'd love to always be able to pick and choose which parts of the "law" or t&cs I follow, I don't get to do that. I accept them all, or I don't play on the site.

Additionally if Stinger or anyone else is really concerned about the health of the game and getting it back into the US, vpning is a really bad look because (a) having proof that people continue to play on Stars from the US makes it harder for Stars to get licensed in the US in the future and (b) legislators will be reluctant to license any online poker if they have examples of situations where vpns were used to effectively circumvent geoblocks.

Finally, I don't think that the two issues are as easy to separate as you are trying to make them. As others have pointed out, if you say that vpning is fine and no big deal, then you almost have to star making allowances for high profile pros to MA as well. Otherwise, all of the low profile people get to merrily vpn from home while the big names are the only ones who are forced to move. That doesn't seem like a particularly good rule to me, so I'd rather just work on enforcing the policy that nobody gets to vpn from the US.

Meh, LucidDream, you're wrong here.

Adding more offenses does make it worse because it reveals the lengths one will go to in order to accomplish something unethical or illegal.

analogy: if you steal a car in order to rob a bank, that's worse than just robbing a bank.

if you steal a car in order to embezzle (more apropos?), then that's worse than just embezzling.

lol

This is one of the worst arguments I've ever heard. The correct analogy to your financial markets example would be someone that is using insider trading vs someone that has gained an edge through in depth analysis. If Brian was using software that is legal like you were saying about Ike and Zima didn't know about it, that is part of the game. Not when you intentionally deceive someone. Just like Zima said, Brian gained information on an opponent he made a bet in the WSOP against without Zima knowing. That is definitely scummy along with many other reasons.

this. cherry picking what rules to follow is a slippery slope. it's not like this is some small loophole or little known law that stinger is exploiting either. it's pretty common knowledge and definitely a big deal.

Terrible post, he obviously did out Brian and took (and is still taking) a ton of **** for doing so.

Are you going to snap post a big denunciation of a name player in NVG next time you hear a rumor about them? You aren't going to think about it first?

If you care about cheating/ethics, you should be super grateful Bakes spoke up instead of nitpicking and haranguing him on how he did it.

Maintaining a culture of cheating/unethical behavior in poker requires two things, obviously cheating/unethical people, and apologists like you to attack anyone with the courage to speak up.

I'll go with no, but they did play heads up.