I'm not convinced that the UKGC will choose to prosecute but they could.They are the prosecuting authority in the UK and could if they wanted get European Arrest Warrants for anyone in the EU.

Cheating is a criminal offence in the UK and that includes collusion and botting. If you break the Ts & Cs that make up the rules of the game you are cheating. The maximum term is 2 years in gaol.

As more and more sites report more and more people caught cheating and having their funds seized the pressure grows to prosecute some.

Personally I don't care much about an individual being prosecuted... sure in a perfect world they would be but that's not why I was happy this legislation came to pass.

What excited me was that operators would have to divulge how much money was seized and how much money is given out in refunds to victims of collusion. For years sites have made huge sums by paying out far less than was seized.

tbh though I didn't expect this would have much teeth to it as operators have no incentive to divulge this info and the authorities likely don't even know what to look for.

This is very likely true. I think Stars likely just figured out the most fair way to distribute however much money they were able to seize from whoever was violating the terms.

They could of gone into their pockets to make everyone completely whole, but I think that (what I'm assuming) they actually did was reasonable and commendable.

Would is be a valid argument that Stars should make every player whole regardless of how much was seized?

and when the cheaters are not from europe? what if the cheaters bought fake accounts to cheat on? where exactly do you draw the line? is it using a software and/or collusion? if its software, where is the line between a hud and a custom statistic program? if its collusion are you prosecuting every mtt reg that final tables and gets ghosted or just people that are on the same table?

i am all for banning cheaters but you must consider the vague contradicting rules that currently "govern" online poker. the poker community seem fine about using huds, tools that work out ICM on the fly etc.. but when someone creates a new custom tool that they cant use, they cry and moan. its essentially the same as recreational players moaning about pros using huds.

playing devils advocate here, but if a site spends say 10,000 hours in a year looking into players that other players suspect are cheating, how much should the poker site "charge" for this time. I mean, every day certain people even from nl10 gets accused of cheating multiple times. Why? Because people bot and cheat at every level. So for the 1,000's of inquiries the sites get some of them are quite complicated and take many hours, think of banning a group of colluders.

They get better every year at detection using computer algorithms but the cheaters get better every year too. So PS needs to keep some of the money to actually pay for the investigations, rake for nl10 or for nl2000 isn't going to cut it. I would think.

Yes I made the numbers up, just to make a point. They could be wildly different, in both directions. PS might also claim that they take 0 of the balances of banned players, I am not sure.

It aint that hard. If you use software that the site prohibits - that is cheating. Ghosting is cheating, Multi Accounting is cheating because that's what the site's Ts & Cs (the rules of the game) say.

its important to prosecute unenforceable rules.

lock all dem bumhunters up!

It really depends on what the site promises its players. For example Stars at one point (not sure if they still do) says that victims of collusion will be compensated regardless of what funds the offenders still have in their accounts. The issue is that those words sound nice but not many people claim that this is reality.

Other sites don't even state their policies and no site to my knowledge has ever publicly discussed what does it mean exactly to be "fairly compensated".

As players we have become conditioned to accepting whatever the sites choose as the ultimate outcome. No other businesses can act with such little oversight. But poker players in general are some of the absolute worst people in the world to organize, even it's for our own good, so the status quo continues.

You are kidding right? Oh yes, you are a former employee.

Pokerstars have repeatedly issues micro fractions of refunds in comparisons to how much customers lost to previous botting rings and how much rake was profited. There are crying examples all over 2p2. Head up Sot a d goes do not exists anymore because pokerstars could not stop cheats and decided to just close down the games. Double or nothing bot rings were found and outlined to pokerstars by players a year before stars decided to finally do something and then take credit for it.

The fact that I am a former employee - and thus, no longer have any financial incentive or conflict of interest on this issue - should increase my credibility here.

Nothing in my posts in this thread is based on any secret inside information anyway.

I don't really have any comment on this. What you've written here doesn't have any bearing on anything I've said.
I think you're referring to Heads Up Sit & Go Tournaments here. If that's what you're referring to, then you're obviously wrong - there are a bunch of heads up sit & go tournaments that are currently in the PokerStars client.

Obviously, the fact that Heads Up Sit & Go Tournaments are still running undermines the whole premise of your point here, and conclusively proves that your point has no value, and that nothing you wrote there has any meaning.

Can you please tell me what Double or Nothing Bot Ring you're talking about? I'm not familiar with what you're referring to. Is there perhaps a 2p2 thread or similar?

This had me cracking up.

Chomp you're crusade against Party hasn't yet been completed. Stick to one task at a time.

I think a lot of the confusion comes from people thinking along the lines of this hypothetical situation:

Fact: Players A and B are known to have colluded together
Fact: When HERO checks his hand histories for times when he was at the same table with A and B simultaneously, he finds that he lost $X to them as a pair
Fact: HERO receives a distribution less than $X from PS after A and B are caught

HERO now gets angry because he believes he is entitled to some number >=$X, and says that "micro refunds" have occurred.

citanul's opinion based on some knowledge: This is pretty naive. The people at PS have access to all the hole cards of every hand, and frequently review every single one to manually calculate losses *on hands where cheating actually took place.* Which is generally smaller than total losses to cheaters for a variety of obvious reasons.

So generally I believe repayments are made from a handful of categories and have nothing to do with how much $ PS seizes from a given case:

1. Tournament disqualifications: advancement of players who finished behind cheaters
2. Ring game individual hand analysis: small scale stuff where reviewing every hand is practical, manual calculation and compensation
3. Ring game large data: evidence of cheating, but every hand is not reviewed. Basically do what the players want: find everyone who lost to the cheaters, and pay some large fraction or 100% of that number to the losing players
4. MA/Bot/etc: handled differently but also without bearing on how much money was seized

From what I remember, PS makes no money from seizing funds. Any additional money seized from a cheater's account that cannot be sensibly distributed is either returned to the cheater (because even cheaters sometimes have legitimate winnings and the seizures aren't punitive generally) or put into a fund to compensate other victims whose cheaters do not have money in their account to compensate their victims.

Maybe this has all changed in the past couple years since I had in depth conversations with people who work at PS.

Google is your friend, most major poker news sites reported about the Chinese double or nothing collusion ring. (not bots AFAIK) You mean to tell me you worked for Stars and had no idea, c'mon bro.

I knew about the collusion, not anything about bots. I made the mistake of thinking that there was a relationship between the words that CHOMP wrote, and reality. Obviously, there isn't.

This is a stretch imo, breaching the T&C's is basically a civil matter. Criminality may be involved, but breaching the terms is irrelevant under criminal law.

Didn't some dude from the UK get prison time for this recently dealing with 888?

Read the law - it ain't civil, it is criminal:The Ts and Cs are the rules, breaking the rules = cheating.

https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2005/19/section/42

Note that Britain is the exception here, this wouldn't be a criminal matter in the vast majority of countries.

Re 'read the law': the UK ceased to be the center of the world a long long time ago, weird to expect someone to somehow see UK legislation as the standard regarding anything, let alone gambling legislation.

But in 2014 the UK became the centre of global poker regulation.

How so when the UK licences the vast majority of online poker? Only the US facing maverick sites aren't regulated by the UK.

Belgium, Denmark, Poland, Malta and a ton of other countries licences the vast majority of online poker as well, some well before the UK did. It's not as if the UK is giving out global licences, they apply just to the UK. Thus the UK is by no means the center of global poker regulation.

I hope when the USA comes back and regulates poker (20-100 years from now) that botters, cheaters, and colluder's are sentenced to the death penalty, by stoning.

Not quite the same. The UK has an open system - others try to limit the number of licences. Also the UK is the only one demanding their global figures for poker cheating (along with a UK share figure).