So there’s a AMA thread in MTT Community started by a degen rec who has lost 180k on high stakes Stars MTTs
Didn’t take long before some genius reg advised him to get coaching and ghosting because that’s ofc standard

Got me thinking, in the high variance world of HS MTT, how much of that 180k was he literally cheated out of, and how much different would/could (obv variance dependant) that 180k look if it wasn’t for the disadvantages a rec is up against when they play online

-stolen HHs/database buying
-Ghosting/Stables
-colluding
-bots
-illegal software/dream machines
-multi accounting
-grinder chat groups sharing information in realtime (ie anyone got notes on this guy?)
-what did I miss

Example: Say he got ghosted on one big final table that lead to a correct fold/call by a ghosted villain that changed his result from 7th $8000 to 2nd $85000.

With declining skill edges and such big advantages gained by the cheats, has online poker become more of a cheating game than a playing game

If I’m right....it’s a terrible state of affairs and one would think good players would be more motivated to protect recs by at least giving them a fair game before fleecing them. Otherwise poker will surely die

Are you asking a question or is just a rant

Here for the popcorn.

So you ask yourself that question after the mentioned specific thread? Why not in 2008 when you made your account? Most of these things have been around since people can play for cash online. Which is btw the reason all the shady stuff happens, CASH. Humans are greedy.

There is no real answer to your questions.

Should have played live poker with that 180k it would have worked out better

so you just took some arbitrary context to put out a few problems with online poker as it is played today - great stuff!

ppl surely love to pull a tim stone nowadays - just keep on posting on how everybody is cheating, edges are so low and the dream is so over and you might, just might feel better with yourself eventually. pathetic

the example you gave - nice maths

I mean if you just want an answer to 'is there more money in cheating than being good,' that depends on how you cheat and how good you are at it.

A competent cheater is probably going to make more money than the vast majority of competent players - but that would be the same in just about anything.

Is there more money in stealing than in working? Depends what you steal and how well you do it.

There is always more $ is cheating than being good - that applies to anything. The downside is you could get caught. So it's all about risk vs reward.

On the specific issue of poker: yes, there's huge amounts of cheating going on. Mainly in cash games and sit and go's on networks like ipoker, party and WPN. You'd be stupid to think that if you hopped into a 6max cash game on these networks, you're getting a fair game of poker. Most likely you are being colluded against by several eastern euro players, or someone is using illegal software to help them make decisions, or they're just bots.

You didn't get cheated, the game just passed you by.
Let it go.

Technology combined with a predatory game involving money. What could go wrong?

The equation is pretty simple though. Keep playing if you can still beat it. Stop if you can't. Not worth worrying about something that was inevitable since the very first hand of online poker.

Literally this. There is no scenario in anything where cheating isn't theoretically more profitable.

Do you get better grades if you cheat on your exams or if you study?

Isn't there usually more money in cheating at something than in being good at such thing (assuming it is a significant cheat)?

I think cheating in other aspects of life usually has more negative external consequences which may curb said cheating

When I saw the thread title, I figured this would be a discussion that considers that very factor. There was a time when games were soft enough that it would have been more +EV to hone your skills than it would be to risk everything by cheating at them. With poker getting tougher and tougher, AND with technology like bots and real-time solvers getting more sophisticated, AND with sites having anonymous tables and/or no hand histories available, I wonder if the risk-reward balance hasn't shifted to where the OP has a solid, salient point.

I'm way too out of touch from the online world to offer any educated opinion on this, but I'd be interested in hearing from those who are still very much in the game.

marriage

not really, cheating would have been even more profitable back then because people were so bad that your edge would be even greater. But like people have pointed out, it depends on how good you are at cheating, if you were bad at it and got caught, then yeah

I think that’s what I was trying to say. I view botting and having imported HHs in your HUD as small edges at best


Mixing tramadols with a few shots of single malt turned my question into a bit of a mangled rant tbf

i strongly disagree, it depends on time horizons. short term sure, but long term cheating is frequently the bad play.

This is seriously not me joking, this is information cheaters use to delude you so they can cheat more.

Cheaters lose in the long run? Ask Brock Lesner, Jon Jones and Donald Trump how that long term cheating went.

The top cheaters will always come out ahead of the top non cheaters, because the game the cheaters are playing, minimizing being caught, is easier to play than following the rules of the game. Winning the game is easy for them, the violate the rules that complicate the game. The top cheaters, when caught, still get rewarded in the end more than non cheaters do.

Think of every CEO that gets grilled by Congress for cheating. Heavily rewarded for it.

Either you suffer from ASPD or you have a disadvantage in our modern world. If you ever said you wish you could care less about things, that's complaining about not being ASPD.

The world is ****ed, and X / 0 = the universe, so everything is zero.

"Didn’t take long before some genius reg advised him to get coaching and ghosting because that’s ofc standard"

I'm going to guess this is not OFC-STANDARD and OP wasn't exactly blessed in the grey matter dept.

OP of thread in MTT community has a job that makes him £1000 a day, so hopefully you mean OP of this thread

I’d guess ghosting of nervous in-make-up horses is pretty much standard. That’s the edge which is significant to recs in their rare chances of scores at large final tables

Sorry to hear you lost 180k

One of the biggest problems is that there's no effective deterrent. Very few of the online card rooms are willing to prosecute cheats, despite there being adequate legislation to imprison them if they're caught. Other than potentially losing profits when the account is discovered/ frozen, there's no downside to being a cheat.

I'm in the UK, and there's only been one prosecution made public (Darren Woods); if there were more of them, maybe the cheats would think twice.

Pretty much, eventually all that negative stuff blows up in your face. Even if you get away with it, it still hits a person's life hard.

OP of the MTTc thread here. Just to correct a couple of points for the record:

- I am not a HS MTT player (my ABI is $33 as was stated in my OP of the MTTc thread), although I have played a few. My ROI is about -13% over the last 6 years, but probably closer to -8% over the last couple of those. Total buy-ins are about $1.35m per SharkScope.

- I don't think I've ever been on an FT of a tourney with more than 40k or so up top.

- I don't make £1000/day. I said $1000, it's actually a bit less than that at current exchange rates. It's around the £650 mark. This is towards the high end for a decent software dev (contract) in London, but not a huge outlier.

Not that the above are really material to OP's point, but I feel precision is important. Crack on.