It's all skill yo.

No money in MTTs everyone's solid.

What if they introduced a tourney where players get assigned a random number for a screen name. Nobody knows me to start, I don't know anybody.

Seems needless to worry about ghosting, if people want to cheat, they gonna cheat. We can't control this. After all this is a game of trickery and deceit. cheaters are inevitable.

and squee i heard u got ghosted by bigdog p5s in that sunday million, this tru?

If they really wanted to I bet stars could do something clever with the data and try to detect multi-accounters by analysing hand histories.

If you combined that with other checks such as which ips they play from they could probably catch a fair few. It obv wouldnt be fool proof but could be a deterrent. Sounds like a fun research project.

Probably even do something data driven to detect FT ghosting.

Also, allowing people to change nicks would level the playing field a bit.

ANd just outright bannign huds would help as lots of people wouldnt be bothered to find a work around.

Edit - maybe formalising a reporting system where you can alert stars anonymously if you think someone is cheatin g- migh thelp remove some of the snitching stigma.

ghosting is not legal if you stand to directly gain anything from it... ie. if you back someone and ghost them that's not allowed.

and why should marc grow up isn't what he said a fact?

i think its time for mandatory webcam poker. cant see any other way around this.

i don't know what is fact... but if it was, why phrase it as a question?

glad we can agree on parts tho.

also re: ghosting: unenforceable, this debate has been over for years guess we can have it again though (and again... and again...)

1) Kleath is right as usual tons of shady stuff going on.

2) If squee revealed a handful of mostly former US players it would just be the tip of the iceberg. This community is never going to catch players from Russia, Brazil, etc. (Not stereotyping those countries as cheaters just saying they have their own forums, don't participate as much on 2p2, and aren't all well known.)

3) Ghosting and HUDs are both impossible to prevent without a ton of radical changes that Stars isn't willing to make. That being said maybe punishing a few obvious offenders and forcing ghosting deeper underground would cause people to change their morals. On the other hand right now there are certain accounts we all know are really BK, MM etc and we can adjust at least.

4) The real cause for all this is that if you want on Stars you can fire up 16 tables of 2-4 NL 6max but if you want 15 more tables of the sunday million you have to do something shady and that's a big incentive. I've always thought this forum came down too hard on METs given how many of the best players get multiple shots at a wcoop anyway.

5) Obviously METs wouldn't take away the incentive to ghost since 16 tables is still better than 2-6 tables and equity late in the tournament is so much higher. But if ghosting was riskier also... I don't know.

This thread is so dumb should really just be closed imo.

that is so incredibly impossible and sounds far from fun

how does changing names help anything?

banning huds would make it harder to analyze hhs which is exactly what u were wanting to do in ur 1st statement

emailing stars is anonymous?

GREAT POST DAVE

GREAT POST DAVE

One thing to be said about this specific point is that when you fire up 16 tables of 2-4 NL 6max, you won't ever be on the same table as yourself. When you have multiple shots at the WCOOPME, this isn't the case.

Probably a minor nitpick, and I don't mean to distract the thread, so I apologize if that is the case.

FWIW, I think the people who come off as the biggest douches in this thread are those like LeonP, who's only purpose is to stifle any type of discussion on the topic.

I'm currently overseas but will gladly put forward a name when I get back to Australia in a couple weeks. Just need to double check my database before naming someone.

I think there is merit in what Squee is thinking but he's going about it the wrong way. Staked players don't deserve to be treated the same. But if some regs are outed for ghosting or being ghosted and it comes to light that there is some connection between some of them (same stable, same friend group etc) then obv a good thing.

The biggest ghost in this thread appears to be Squee... where have you gone?

changing names helps because some people do it anyway as lipo and kleath pointed out - it would just make it legal according to the t&c and available to all.

banning huds wouldnt make it harder for STARS to analyze the data which is what I suggested

emailing stars is anonymous but there is no official way of reporting cheating afaik - it might lift some of the stigma around snitching on people you know are cheating.

I think it would be an interesting project for a data geek - i agree it might not be possible.

Point is that its not just black and white - stars could do more to stop it than they do.

you get 0/10 for simple reading comprehension. No doubt now youll just post a sarcy giff for people to wank over.

explain again how exactly banning HUDs will get rid of the ghosting issue?

if you have the suspicion of being colluded against, of people being ghosted, of people using a VPN etc. stars will ALWAYS look into the matter if you email them, they take that stuff pretty seriously.

but hey, good job on informing yourself before posting those awesome suggestions

I never said it would get rid of ghosting issues - HUD use has been brought up in the thread as a separate issue.

I thought maybe an official cheating reporting feature might get more traction than sending emails to support.

what suggestions have you got ? or is it just **** it its insurmountable

edit - maybe my original email where I said 'banning huds would help' was badly worded - i didnt mean specifically regarding ghosting.

Poker obviously gets more scammers and other greedy guys without common decency, as Orwell would say, amongst a rather young population who lives by gambling a lot of money.

on using the data, zen fish posted this in the thread lipo linked to,

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.

That all sounds dandy but what about the random fish who's playing style may change quite significantly depending on their mood? Are we going to accuse them of cheating everytime? What about most really good players who adapt their play styles based on a vast array of factors in any given poker tournament? While it sounds great in theory I think it's almost impossible to start accusing people based off those things when we are all human and it's almost impossible to prove.

If you're too firm with it then innocent people get banned. If you're not firm enough with it then what's the point?

Adam -- one fatalistic way to look at it would be that you can eliminate collusion in MTTs, and ghosting in cash, but collusion and ghosting will always add up to the same amount of cheating either way.

The market reinforces a relatively flat, baseline level of cheating, in other words.

I eagerly await your future input, I wont hold my breath though, going off how cowardly most poker players are.

+1 for hud ban btw

OP should have come in all guns blazing. Instead he came in half heartedly, it's like when a pro athlete in a contact sport, like rugby, goes in to a challenge without full conviction, they are more likely to get injured that way, better off to go in full force so you're less likely to get hurt and thus more likely to hurt the opposition.

so just completely rely on poker sites to catch cheaters by banning huds and allowing name changes, sounds great.

how is emailing stars not the official way to report cheating? are u just arguing for fun?

now go back to posting strat threads for the 3r

do u understand how incredibly complex that is?