Yesterday i had a situation in a 9max SNG with 3 winning seats at the bubble as follows preflop:
- Player SO: 1,6 BB (sit out) in big blind with 0,6 BB left
- Player BB1: 9,5 BB (bubble boy 1) - folded
- Player BB2: 6,8 BB (bubble boy 2) - folded
- Player BS: 49,5 BB (big stack) - small blind - folded
The big stack player folded to the sitting out player. "Sit out" means here that the players does not simply folded all hands but was in a real sit out / disconnect what is visible in the software client.
He did this 4 times in a row whenever the sitting out player was big blind he folded to him and to all others players he pushed preflop allin. Finally the big stack blinded down the bubble boys and was in heads up with the sitting out player.
I wrote a ticket to the site, since my opponion is that this was illegal play by the big stack. The answer was, that this was not illegal play but a clever strategy.
I reanswered this mail since i found a rule at this site which clearly says:
Quote:
"Deliberately losing chips to other players for whatever reason will not be tolerated and WILL be picked up by our collusion monitoring team and dealt with accordingly."
I'm awaiting for a answer to that.
My questions to you are:,
What do you think about it?
Is it illegal play?
Should it be illegal?
How do other sites handels such situations?
In my opinion it can't be legal or should be illegal for a simple reason.
Imagine 3 different situation:
1) 2 Players does collusion and one big stack is dumping chips to another low stack.
2) Player A don't likes player B and dumping chips to player C when A and B are fighting as low stacks at the bubble
3) The situation i described with folding to sit out.
The first two situations are clearly illegal. The action in all situation is the same, chip dumping. The only difference is the reason for the dumping. A site cant look into the heads of the players and clearly identify the reasons. If a site decides benevolent that situation 3 was a tactic, it must be also benevolent in the other situations and come to the conclusion that it was maybe a tactic.
So the action must be always illegal, not some of the reasons, if a site wants to prevent cheating effectively in general.
What me shocked was the fact that the site support said that this behavior was a good tactic. In my opinion it was no good tactic, it was just shameless exploiting the fact that the bubble boys expected fair play. When it was clear that the big stack did no accidental folds, they were so much down that they were not able to do anything against it. That's not clever but ruthless.
In fact the big stack build a team of two players that didn't were concurrents anymore. That's not a fair environment.
Most of us are running for their money, but even if you call me naive, there should be always a rest of honor since its some kind of sports (at least to me). It was a 5€ SNG, not a nosebleed tourney.
(I'm new to this forum, so please don't roast me if i my post did not fully fits into your kind of discussions. I'm sorry for my broken English. I tried my best.)
Last edited by teenriot; 03-25-2018 at 06:40 PM.