Poll - Should Pokerstars disclose what country people are logged in from?

PSA: It's been obvious for a while now that a ton of multi-accounting exists on iPoker where it's quite easy to do so with so many skins and less than stellar support. I've seen fishy things going on for a while and have had my suspicions, but today I finally confirmed one.

CONFIRMED: Caught LaoBan8 chip-dumping to catchmybreath this morning @ 1/200 HU. Proof is that I've played them both HU with significant samples, watched them play for a while, noticed some EXTREMELY fishy/peculiar plays by both (tons of clicking it back raises + snapfolds, +SUPER fast play..) So then I sit Lao on other table and he says "later". I say "too busy chipdumping? stop making it so obvious". He doesn't reply. On the other table w catch/Lao, catch immediately times out of a hand, sits out, and snap-leaves. No chat from anyone.

SUSPICIONS: I'm hesitant to post this because I don't have any proof, but I'll post it anyway with a preface that it's just a strong hunch. The account "exasperated" never seems to be online while both Lao/catch are online. I suspect that all 3 of these accounts are tied together somehow, yet I'm still not sure exactly how.

CONCLUSIONS:
1) Be suspicious of playing with more than 1 of these accounts at the same table.
2) Jared needs to work on his chip-dumping skillz.

EDIT: I should also mention that I have played 3h w catch/lao at the same time. I don't recall much in the way of suspected collusion, so I won't go as far as to accuse of that. But its important to note that the person/ppl behind these accounts are more than willing to play at the same table, and even 3handed.

funny that u mention that.first time i saw catchmybreath was some weeks ago and he instaplays lhe 300 600 and also plo10 and 20k.i dont play that big but also railed.the lhegames seemed pretty normal tho if i remember correctly.
anyway, find it always suspicious if someone shows up out of the blue and plays 2games at the highest stakes available,even hu.unfort plo aint tracked on ipoker.

I wonder if Mike and Adam have recently asked Bleznick to be on the Pokercast. Be nice to get his views on the matter.

Thanks for the PSA FortutiousGent. Wonder when someone that was close to Jared then multiaccounted by him will step forward.

Ben Grundy is also very likely multiaccounting Pokerstars in my opinion. He don't seat his own account almost at all, HU or 6m for at least a year. Still he whine about not getting HU action there, whine against bumhunting saying he understand people multiaccounting to get action and he whine against the seatscribt on 6m a year after last playing those 6m games. Been plenty of 6m action on Pokerstars that he did take part in and winning, before suddenly not playing them from his milkybarkid account anymore (new staker?) while action is still good. I think this is strongly suspicious. Just like lot of the team Canada accounts.

Here's a thought:

In this day and age of collecting metadata and profiling people's online behavior for all sorts of purposes, how hard can it be for a pokersite to build metadata profiles on players and use them for game integrity purposes?

We all leave traces of ourselves behind whenever we do something online. When we play poker, we display lots of personal patterns, some of them related to playing style, others to timing patterns, mouse movement patterns, session lengths, when in the day we play, the games we play, and so on. Conceivably, such data could be automatically collected and stored at limits higher than such-and-such. Then, when multiaccounting accusations fly, the data could be used in the investigation, together with IP data.

Would such metadata profiling conflict with privacy rights? I don't think it does. Playing poker anonymously is not a fundamental human right. Your poker account is a commercial service provided by a company. Verifying your identity is already part of the account registration procedure. For all I know some sites' anti-cheating software could be collecting such metadata already, but I haven't seen it discussed.

It's possible, but would require a huge amount of (time, money & people) resources that I guess the sites think could be better used elsewhere.

Multi account detection or new facebook poker app? Which is more valuable?

i think thats a good idea zen and given what nsa does it seems doable but probably hard to implement.i dont see lawproblems if you sign an updated tos.however, given the consens about ma i dont think its worth the effort for the sites.right now not enough pl think strongly against maing imho.

Yep, there are also other much more specific identifiers (which it wouldn't be a good idea to elaborate on here) which can be collected. It's possible that Stars do so already, but if they do they're not going to talk about it because (a) not a good idea to tell the cheaters what you do; and (b) it would agitate those concerned about privacy.

I think this sums him up well. Very suspicious and shady character that I wouldn't trust at all.

hahahaha love that video, antonius is like DO U THINK I GIVE A """" WHAT UR SAYING

lmaoSPdbSFbsbfFf

that video

Bleznick finally snapped with online poker and just thought "**** all these morons, they don't like me...so I'll rob the lot of em"

Didn't you hear his accent? He didn't say that, nor did he ever think it.

OMG that video is painful to watch. We have a guy who frequents local chess tournaments but rarely plays. He then goes up to every person who just lost and starts asking stupid questions like that. "Why did you lose? Did you fall for a trap? Did you prepare for that opening?", etc. Same tone of voice as Bleznick here. I think they are both just trying to troll by kicking people when they are down.

I wouldn't imagine chess players getting violent, but how they hell does someone hold back on someone like that. Amazing.

How do people have so little distance from their ego that they cant see how horrible douchy it is? haha unbelievable.

honestly, he just sounds like a loner trying to fit in, i don't think he really meant to needle patrik. in the superpanel at quadjacks, he comes off as extremely knowledgeable about poker and was pretty well spoken (complete contrast to this). when he asked phil and phil just kept his mouth open, i felt that was like such a douche thing to do on phils part tbh

but how come no sites are taking action if its that obvious bleznick is behind all these accounts? thats the thing thats curious to me, it seems like there's considerable evidence against him

Maybe if they take action now, they sort of are admitting that they missed this issue the entire time and know they will be given fault in a way for it.

But that is a very good question..why has nothing been done?

This. I always thought it was weird that if I sat at a cash game online at the same table as my friend or neighbor, I would get instabanned, but Patrik Antonious, Ivey, Durr, Gus, etc. all obviously know each other and know each other's phone numbers, and play the highest stakes available but they sit together and that is ok. I'm not saying any of them have shared hole card info or cheated, but they could have at any point in time and no one would stop them.


I like the idea that everyone gets one account and they have to use their real full name as their screen name, and if there are 2 John Smith's one is labeled John Smith 2. You have to produce a copy of drivers license when you make the account. Location should also be available when you hover the mouse, and not just "Russia", should be exact city and state/province.

Winner! Seems like a great idea.

Relative wise it shouldn't be to expensive and hard to implement on highstakes to make sure the games are clean for cheaters that multi-account.

Pokerstars is the nuts and hopefully able to implement this. I'm sure the highstakes community and railers would greatly appreciate that people play 1 account only.

Do what makes the most money fk everything else. Does that bother you?

You're kidding? You think it's a good idea to put your full name and actual location online? It'll only be a matter of time before someone gets killed over a $10 pot from some crazy gambling addict who goes crazy over a beat or a needle at the table as they bust their life roll. It's acceptable for the sites to know, but once they've cleared it then that sort of transparency is not required to players or even observers of who lives where. Not to mention there's the other end of the scale with nosebleed players being at risk of theft too.

To summarise: horrible idea.

Ha

My tech know-how is limited, but from what I've learned in the wake of the NSA scandal, this does not seem to be a hard problem. Collecting data is not difficult, and storage is cheap. They would not even have to do this automatically, they could flip a switch to gather metadata from suspected MA'ers, and analyze it.

It might not be worth the effort from the sites' perspective in the short term, but both sites and players benefit from clean games in the long term. Improving the reputation of the industry and all that.