Finally, someone hits the nail on the head. It's not about how much you think of someone despite their cheating, breaking the rulese, whatever...IT'S ABOUT KILLING THE ACTION. How many new players do you think want to jump into a game they suspect has even more of an edge to it???? They don't mind playing someone better than they are...that's just a challenge...But, they do mind if they think the fix is in. Newbies equal easy money. Cheating, or even the perception of it, kills the goose that is laying golden eggs. That's why these sites have to come down so hard.

No, moron....I'm a NO-stakes nit, and will remain so until this gets resolved.

And you have no idea of my skill level, or the amount of study I've put in...but just for the fun of it, let's assume I'm a newbie fish....THAT is why everyone should care about me!

Lets not forget that money trickles up.....small stakes winners move up to try to beat bigger games which majority of the time they wont be able to do right away....and you in turn will try to take your winnings and try to beat bigger games and so on all the way to the top.
We all were, are or will be "THE LIVE ONE" ....even the best, Jen Harman was the donator at a certain level till she got good enough to beat that. Its a big pyramid if the fish at the bottom disapear the money will eventually disapear from the top as well.

That is why it is not good for the Pros to be playing Beal....If Beal wins, that is millions out of the poker economy...and if the edge isnt that good its not worth the risk vs. reward.(Looks like the pros got it right and put Ivey in to ad 7 mill back into our economy)

Imagine your game with out a "live one" it would just be skilled players passing chips back and forth losing to the rake. The low stakes nits as you call it is what fuels our economy...

Cheating is what destroyed internet backgamon (their problem was bots though, which by the way is also one of our problems) and if wide spread cheating scares the fish away it will be the beginning of the end for us... no .10/.20 games will eventually mean tougher 5/10 which will mean un beatable 50/100

who is atimos? not too cool for a no-name to be talking smack to a potential addition to my bankroll. Al tell him to gf himself

I could live with a ban on multiple accounts playing the same tournaments from the same ip address, although you have to realize this isn't foolproof. What I think would be a bad idea would be to prohibit accounts from using the same IP address alltogether. Just to give an example, in the past I have played from my both of my brothers' places, they have played at mine, and when I was home for the holidays I played a little from my parents house where both my brothers have also played from. We have never done anything shady at all.

The point is that you wouldn't want to create a situation where you can't go over to a friend's house and play poker. It would be an overreaction. As I've said before, the solution isn't to try to find someway to prevent cheating altogether. There will always be loopholes. What needs to happen is for sites to get better programs to identify potentially suspicous activity and then seriously investigate people who raise red flags. They also need to continue to act on tips. You will not catch everyone but you can start to make people who would otherwise cheat think its not worth it.

Of course sites cannot completely stop it. But there are some things they could do to make it more difficult for casual and opportunistic cheaters:

1. Like Royal Vegas Poker, only permit one account per household

2. If they want to allow more than one account per household, be more vigorous about verifying identity of account users from the same household. My wife and I both have accounts on more than one site. The only site that ever called to check up on this is party poker.

3. Do not allow more than 1 account from a household to participate in any tournament or cash game. Inconvenience to some people--yes. But, as the sites say, online poker is different than live poker. Different rules are sometimes needed.

4. Be more proactive about investigating accounts playing from the same IP. I do understand that there are many valid reasons why multiple accounts could be playing from the same IP. However, this is also a situation that is common for multi-accounting cheating. There are many things sites can do to be proactive about verifying that things are on the up-and-up when multiple accounts are playing from the same IP.

5. Vigorously monitor IM chat for indications of collusion. This is not hard to do. Most IM clients do not encrypt data so it would be easy to do some pattern mapping that triggers investigation.

6. Make it illegal to share you hole cards with other people. While this is not entirely enforceable, it gives them something to hang their coat on when they suspect collusion because someone is typing in their hole cards into an IM conversation.

7. Do more publicly to discourage cheating. For example, they could publish something akin to a police blotter that announces when they've caught people cheating. They don't even have to say who it was. I bet there would be plenty of casual cheaters that would be discouraged from colluding if there were a scrolling page with entries like:

01:15am 2/16/06:
Two players we discovered to be sharing hole card information in a $10+1 sng. Their accounts were closed and their funds confiscated and returned to the players affected.

14:22pm 2/8/06:
Our software detected that a player entered a tournament with more than one account. His accounts were immediately closed and funds returned to the players affected.

etc.

These are mostly good ideas. I don't think #1 is necessary if #2 and #3 were actually enforced. It really would be something of a hassle if you couldn't play at a friends house and I don't see how it would it be necessary if you couldn't play the same tournament from the same IP address. We shouldn't kid ourselves that this would solve the problem though. It isn't really that hard to have two connections from the same place.

I really don't like #5. I'm not trying to download spyware onto my computer and I don't think I should have to submit to people mining my chats just because I'd liike to play poker online. I actually don't think I'd play on a site that did this.

#6 frankly seems silly. It really doesn't make sense to have rules that are totally unenforceable. So I can't have someone who is over at my apartment looking over my shoulder while I play? If someone calls me on the phone I can't say, "damn I have JJ and got reraised, what the hell does he have?" When you have a rule like this that everyone will break twice a day it just encourages people to think they can break other rules with impunit as well.

#4 and #7 are good ideas. Sometimes you just aren't going to be able to tell whether someone is cheating unless you really take a hard look at account activity. I really don't think its possible to catch every single cheater, but you can convince people there is a real risk to cheating. If you read the "apology" posts its very clear that it really never occurred to these guys that they would be caught. Some people will not cheat because they think its wrong, but there are plenty of scumbags out there who will cheat unless they think they might get caught. Make some more examples and I think we are going to stop seeing as much multi-accounting.

I don't like #5 either as I don't want to poker sites monitoring my personal conversations. However, I think we all realize that a lot of casual colluding occurs via IM chat. And if we want real solutions that decrease the amount of cheating, we do have to give up some privacy in specific cases. There is nothing that disallows the sites from doing this now and they may actually do a little of it.

I understand your argument about #6. As a hard and fast rule it really isn't a good one. I was thinking more of a rule they could use if they know someone is sharing card info, suspect them of cheating, but can't prove it. But, upon reflection, those kinds of rules are just about always bad rules.

I agree with you that you can never completely stop it. But you can decrease it--especially casual cheating which is probably the most frequent.

Big Al- I as well am concerned about the possiblities of colluding, etc. during my online poker sessions but in reality. There is no definite answers as to how this all will be stopped. If you feel depositing money is seriously too great a risk, then just don't do it.

There is really no way to stop cheaters period.

ISP adresses can be manipulated (ie using different connections at the same time, PC anywhere which will allow me to use a computer logged in in colorado even though Im in LA) combined with using different members info (ie family memmbers) and a dedicated computer per account and viola it will seem like one player is actually a bunch of different people ...We must accept that no matter what when there are millions of dollars on the line people will always find a way to cheat...Its human nature. Crazy Russ G. has been talking about it for years...Though I think he is crazy, his methods are viable, only way to catch it is the sites realizing that the accounts play way too much together.
But in the MTT setting forget about it....
Put this in the hands of a talented player like JJ and skys the limit.
We as players have to understand this, we have to report every time we feel some thing funny is going on....like the terrorist thing, better to have 10,000 false reports than 1 real one going unreported...shoot we pay enough in rake for the sites to afford the best anti fraud team. The sites should put out an anti cheating news letter with tips on how to spot collusion....

Daniel N wrote this blog . ...http://www.fullcontactpoker.com/poke...amp;ucat=&
Its not about cheating but its the same principles... there is no need to scare the fish away. Players using multi acct. are still some of the best players, cause needless to say, if you suck multi accts will only make you give money away faster. These same player need to understand that if they scare the fish they lose in the long run. MONEY TRICKLES UP the nicer we are to the fish the more money we will make for a longer period of time. we need the top players to reiterate this point over and over. learn the game and play it right.

The "live ones" are our customers, Poker is our store...give them good service, treat them nice, dont cheat them or rip them off and they will keep coming back... and Ive said it before and Ill say it again.... every poker player from the .05/.10 guy to Phil Ivey were, is , or will be at some point in their career "the live one" .

Other players did NOT need marked cards to take all of Chris Moneymakers money. :o)

couldnt have said it better myself trotter