Strange Hand Followup

Just the other day I posted about a Strange Hand I played when the big blind folded a pot of 1,350 to the short stacked small blind for an all-in bet on the flop of only another 22 chips. I had forwarded the hand history to Poker Stars support and heard back from them today:

Hello Floppy,

Thank you once again for reporting your concerns to us. Although we do monitor the games for collusion, we always appreciate vigilant players such as yourself reporting any strange or unusual play to us for review. I have completed my investigation into the accounts of XX and YY.

We have investigated these players and they are clearly related. From time to time, they engaged in softplay or avoided confrontations.

In your tournament, they appeared to play straight up, and as such, the final results of this event will stand. We have educated the players on these rules available here:

http://www.pokerstars.com/tournamentsrules.html
http://www.pokerstars.com/cardroomrules.html

As a further precaution, we have also flagged their accounts so that they cannot play together in real money ring games and Sit and Go tournaments.

Thank you once again for helping us keep our games honest and fair.
Regards,

PokerStars Support Team

Softplaying is a far cry from straight out collusion I suppose but it is so easy for this to happen online. In this case, and many others I'm sure, the people may not even have a clue that they are doing anything at all wrong.

I once played a SNG with my brother while we were on the phone together at the same time. We played tougher against each other than we did against others in the tourney. He would raise my big blind with nothing when he had position and I'd go over top of him with my 83o - thankfully he didn't spite call in that situation. We did talk about the game, but never about what we held until one of us was out of the hand. I like winning and money just as much as the next person, but damn, respect the game and your opponents by playing on the level please.

Per a post on 2+2 a couple days ago, a team of 8 people were apparently shut down on Stars for working together in Omaha. I am not sure whether they all worked together at the same table at the same time, but even with just a few of them there would be a huge advantage simply due to the number of hole cards known amongst the team members, not to mention team betting to manipulate pots.

I'm sure the sites will do whatever they can to stay on top of the various forms of online cheating as it poses a pretty major threat to their revenue stream. No matter what the sites do though, they will never be able to come close to preventing all cheating.

So don't cheat, M'kay?