Stupid Cheater Update

I wrote: If I were low enough to collude in an online poker tournament, I don't think I'd be so amazingly dumb as to post about it in my LiveJournal. Hell, I'd at least friends-lock the damn thing. The post is now friends-locked. I guess the torrent of angry comments he got from Paul Phillips' pointer clued him in.

He writes in his current entry:

paul phillips taught me a lesson today.

a lot of posts will be friends only for the time being.

One hopes the lesson he learned was more than just "if you're going to cheat, don't post it publicly to your blog."

Meanwhile, I sent the post to the PokerStars support team, and this is the response I got:

Hello Alan,

Thank you for your email. Unfortunately there is not enough information here to identify the player in the journal. We offer dozens of these qualifying tournaments every week, and there are many qualifying players in each one. It is nearly impossible to find one player based on the information provided.

You should note that what the players did was actually very stupid. Not only was it against our rules, but it was also strategically a dumb play. If the players had enough chips to be able to limp into the prizes when they combined stacks, they had enough chips to try and both make the prizes.

The term chip dumping is reserved for players who share chips in order for both players to last longer in a tournament. It does not apply to players trying to knock each other out and halve their total possible payout.

If you have any further questions about this or anything else, please let us know!

Regards,
Dan
PokerStars Support Team

If the PokerStars hand history database is in any shape at all, using the information in the post ought to be very straightforward. It should be all the more easy given that ronny bojangles described in detail the play of more than one hand. If I had a zipfile containing all PokerStars hand histories from March 16 and 17, I guess that I could pinpoint the hands in question and identify the perpetrator in something on the order of an hour, most of which would be spent debugging the perl script.

Secondly, that's a very restrictive definition of chip-dumping. If one player in a group of colluders has an overlay in terms of playing ability in a tournament (or even is a substantially better player than the others in the group), then the expectation of the group as a whole is increased at the expense of the other players in the tournament if the weak players in the group blow off their chips to the strong player. This doesn't fit "Dan"'s definition of chip dumping, which demands that the practice enhance the likelihood of all participants' winning, but it is clearly collusion, it clearly has a negative impact on the non-colluding players' EV, and it falls within what most experienced players would label as "chip-dumping."

"Dan"'s reply makes me substantially less confident in the ability and willingness of PokerStars' management to confront collusion. Maybe Ed Felten is right and I was wrong about whether countermeasures against collusion can keep it down to a reasonable level.