Wait, so, did you win a step 6 ticket when you reentered or not?

Memo to JohnnyBax: Have UB read n learn from this thread...

some truth in that there statement!

Glad they corrected the wrong ... to be honest I am glad you laid this out play by play, it shows PS has strong anti-collusion procedures in place and earned my trust in their site once again.

gl bud ... make something out of your second chance

lol

I really lolled

nice going

+1 . This seems like all they should do based on their claim of not finding CONCLUSIVE evidence of blatent collusion.

this isn't even close to colusion he had the guy that was allin beat with 10 high. I could see your point if the allin guy had jack high or something though.

They might have been colluding, but it looks like they sucked at it.

glad it worked out

Technically, checking down in those spots is a form as collusion. For instance it is against the rules in a casino to verbally declare that they are going to check it all the way down. I am guessing that there are hands that make the case stronger.

Grats to OP for not taking this BS lying down and getting the eventual desired effect, and grats to Pokerstars for the best support in the industry.

Grats to OP.
He ripped on me for saying that he needed to provide more details of the situation for people here to believe him. He provided one hand which looked funny but that was it and others would have liked to have seen more if that part of the discussion needed to be continued but Stars addressed this in time and he posted that e-mail instead.

But OP needs to realize that a lot of people who claim to have seen collusion really didn't see what they thought they saw.
I've also seen true situations where it really was appropriate to just warn the members that they aren't allowed to do what they did and it was clearly a case of ignorance more than it was super-blatant collusion. So you can't plead ignorance in all cases.
But in some situations it is appropriate to consider that the guy who was saying in chat something mid-hand that he shouldn't have including something like, "Hey...lets check it down" or "we can team-up against that guy and it benefits both of us" or whatever was just out of super-ignorance and they clearly don't have a history of teaming-up together.

So there are situations where players are just plain dumb and don't know the rules. So without evidence to the contrary and with you just SAYING that it was the wrong decision without showing anything else I thought it appropriate to want to see more.

Anyway, glad you did show more [although just one hand and then further details that this is what they were doing over-and-over such as letting the shortstack always win] and that Stars corrected an obviously wrong decision.

However, really super-weird that you make this purposeful decision to supposedly not out the Stars support member who screwed up and then post the e-mail with his name in it for all to see. How exactly is that not outing him?

this does looks very suspicious if there was no side pot.

Well I guess that's what you get when you inhabit a country with criminals....

To everyone on here who keeps telling how easy it is to get the hand history from pokerstars eventhough i had already been knocked out, i suggest you attempt to do this yourself for a game that you have been eliminated from. I think you will find that hand histories are only available for games that you are still partaking in...
I apologize to Patrick as i realize i did accidently use his name. It was an honest mistake made by him that anyone could make, therefore he does not deserve to have his name in the online poker world tarnished.

And even more so with one player all in with 3 players left when 1st and 2nd get the SAME PRIZE.

The hand was definitely suspicious, and although not conclusive, one only needed to read the e-mail from pstars in the OP to see that they made an incredibly bad decision there.

At least they fixed it.

Few months ago I got a funny feeling after bubbling in a $5 STT on stars. I checked the 3 money finishers and they all came from the same town. E-mailed stars with my hunch and they eventually got back to me with a similar repsonse to the one OP got (paraphrased: "we find these players colluded but didn't knowingly cheat...won't be allowed to play together, etc...") I was awarded first place money and that was that.

What has me wondering though is this:

If me and OP hadn't acted on our suspicions I'm guessing the cheating in each of our games wouldn't have come to light. Shouldn't online poker sites have kick ass auto-detection that would nail collusion without the aid of whistle blowers? (Always had assumed they did but now have doubts). I know little about programming but it might work something like this:

Anti-collusion bot searches for suspiciious plays. Each time one is found the players involved are flagged. Flagged players (if further proof needed than those players receiving multiple flags) have their hand histories further examined by staff members (as I assume is done now) and then appropriate actions are taken. You can cross referance data with players' location for further effectivness and throw in whateve parameters would help out the job.

Poker playing bots are pretty sophisticated so surely they can come up with effective cheat-sniffing bots that can recognize tell-tale signs of collusion. Do they already use such tools? If so then I guess that means me and OP would have received the same notices even if we had never e-mailed stars.

This is exactly what happens. When I worked in the collusion team, the vast majority of people who're thrown off have only recently started colluding, there are no long-term colluders.

you are absurdly stupid


---
990 games 0.005 secs 198,000 games/sec

Board: Kh 2d 3d
Dead:

equity win tie pots won pots tied
Hand 0: 55.000% 54.55% 00.45% 540 4.50 { 7d6d }
Hand 1: 45.000% 44.55% 00.45% 441 4.50 { Ts4s }


---








---
893,970 games 0.060 secs 14,899,500 games/sec

Board: Kh 2d 3d
Dead:

equity win tie pots won pots tied
Hand 0: 46.553% 46.23% 00.32% 413301 2870.50 { 7d6d }
Hand 1: 14.684% 13.86% 00.82% 123935 7334.50 { Ts4s }
Hand 2: 38.763% 37.77% 00.99% 337674 8855.00 { random }


---

how are you gonna get paid with your monsters in dead sidepots if you dont bluff at them?

on the board 33334 where you only have 22 and AA, one player is allin with QQ and the third player has KK you strategy will have higher value if you bluff 22 a fraction of the time, because it forces KK to call you and most of the time you will have AA.

very good job. pokerstars just has one of the best support

Are you ****ing serious? Its a step SNG, first and 2nd get the same prize, he doesnt ever need to valuebet any hand ever in this situation you ******ed ****

You can pretty much make the same silent declaration by instachecking online* and live you can even check dark on each street. Anyway, making the move which is +EV for yourself isn't collusion, full stop. Someone in the hand has to be harming their own EV to reap a greater reward for a third player by definition.

*This is a good way to goad the right kind of weak players to play nice and not bet you off 22 in cash games too.