Stakers & Stakees - Collusion issues in live MTTs

[cambridgealex]

Provoked by the Monte Carlo this weekend, I thought I'd get a thread started about this.

It's commonplace by now for backers to put their horses into comps they themselves are playing in. Often a backer will have many horses playing in an individual event. If the backer goes deep then there's a reasonable chance one of his horses has gone deep too and they end up on the same table.

Now there's plenty of scope for intentional and indeed unintentional collusion.

The most basic scenario is the horse shoves and the backer has a hand strong enough to call and potentially knock out his horse. I don't know what the rules say about collusion but I imagine if caught folding aces, this would be penalised in some way. What about kings? What about more marginal situations where it's close either way?

Where do you draw the line?

If affected in any way by the fact that the player allin is a horse, does this make it collusion?

How is it proven? With the hole card technology used in the MC it makes things more transparent, but even with that, what can be done about it?

[Karabiner]

There was a big tourney in '05 I think it was, possibly the Bellagio $25k job that flushy just qualified for.

Anyhow Paul Maxfield from Stoke ended up on the final table three-handed with Tuan Le and another guy who had a piece of Le due to the fact that he had staked him into the tourney where he won his seat(these things can get complicated).

There were a few hands where questionable holdings were folded and aspertions were subsequently cast although having read through the hands at the time I didn't see anything that seemed obviously out of line. However I am a nit of some standing so you may have a completely different opinion if you look up the hands.

[titaniumbean]

You can do zero about it


I want to fold AA on the bubble because I want to cash the fact that i'm folding to someone who I bought into the tournament can't be proven to be the reason, it may be bad but I can do what I want.


I am a live pro so I think that I 'might be racing' with my QQ so I make a disciplined fold.


How can you condemn people for cheating if they are just playing bad + especially if they don't know just how bad what they are doing is. Where do you draw the line is KK a bad fold if they are 'running bad' etc

With hole card cams and shared knowledge of who has backed who then it can lead to some very questionable spots. As usual there is no real way to police the game to the most ethical way. How many times do we need to have threads where people say "I know it should only be me playing my online account"..... and then say "but I don't think it's that bad/care that much etc" and so they let their mate play when their in the toilet, whilst they go to majorca etc.

There are alot of douschey people in the gambling/poker world (and in the world in general) so there are always going to be issues with stuff like this.

The TD always has the option to DeeQ people for not playing within the spirit of the game etc etc however without hole card cams they could never see the issues, and even with them they can only retrospectively punish someone, if they've already increased their equity then you can only punish them by stopping them from playing in the future.

It's hardly feasable to have everyone make known who has what pieces of what and even then poker is so 'situational' it's really hard to condemn the play someone makes. Especially preflop when everyone has equity obviously it's a different story on the river with a nut hand and just folding or something but those sort of spots are so much more obvious and clear cut.

You could say that someone who jams utter rags like jack and two over a limper is colluding with the limper...... xx :p

[Fenix35]

Provoked by the Monte Carlo this weekend, I thought I'd get a thread started about this.

It's commonplace by now for backers to put their horses into comps they themselves are playing in. Often a backer will have many horses playing in an individual event. If the backer goes deep then there's a reasonable chance one of his horses has gone deep too and they end up on the same table.

Now there's plenty of scope for intentional and indeed unintentional collusion.

The most basic scenario is the horse shoves and the backer has a hand strong enough to call and potentially knock out his horse. I don't know what the rules say about collusion but I imagine if caught folding aces, this would be penalised in some way. What about kings? What about more marginal situations where it's close either way?

Where do you draw the line?

If affected in any way by the fact that the player allin is a horse, does this make it collusion?

How is it proven? With the hole card technology used in the MC it makes things more transparent, but even with that, what can be done about it?

Nothing can be done about it as 99% of the time no ones going to see the hole cards anyway. Plus pretty much no-one who's smart enough to have a stable playing in a big live comp would fold aa/kk pre or anything with good equity anyway to their horse as they will always have a bigger incentive financially to win the tournament themselves than to in essence soft-play to their horse.

Similarly, more marginal spots that might be passed up could just be attributed to the lack of point in getting in higher variance spots with capable opponents in a field full of weak droolers.

[redarmi]

Such a fascinating topic.  I think at the point at which you are willing to allow staked players to enter a tournament (and it is obviously very hard to stop it) then you have to expect players to seek to maximise their own personal EV and I don't see why that is a problem so long as it is transparent.  I do think that transparency should be overt though ie. at the beginning of a tournament maybe some kind of list could be provided of those staked into a tournament and who is staking them assuming both parties are playing then players can take possible soft play etc into consideration....that way it just simply becomes another skill element to the game.

[pokerfan]

There was a big tourney in '05 I think it was, possibly the Bellagio $25k job that flushy just qualified for.

Anyhow Paul Maxfield from Stoke ended up on the final table three-handed with Tuan Le and another guy who had a piece of Le due to the fact that he had staked him into the tourney where he won his seat(these things can get complicated).

There were a few hands where questionable holdings were folded and aspertions were subsequently cast although having read through the hands at the time I didn't see anything that seemed obviously out of line. However I am a nit of some standing so you may have a completely different opinion if you look up the hands.

Le went on to win it lol.

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xklztx_hasan-habib-vs-tuan-le_videogames

[Karabiner]

There was a big tourney in '05 I think it was, possibly the Bellagio $25k job that flushy just qualified for.

Anyhow Paul Maxfield from Stoke ended up on the final table three-handed with Tuan Le and another guy who had a piece of Le due to the fact that he had staked him into the tourney where he won his seat(these things can get complicated).

There were a few hands where questionable holdings were folded and aspertions were subsequently cast although having read through the hands at the time I didn't see anything that seemed obviously out of line. However I am a nit of some standing so you may have a completely different opinion if you look up the hands.

Le went on to win it lol.

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xklztx_hasan-habib-vs-tuan-le_videogames

Thanks for finding that.

Having watched it again a few years later I find that play fairly questionable myself now.

[pokerfan]

There was a big tourney in '05 I think it was, possibly the Bellagio $25k job that flushy just qualified for.

Anyhow Paul Maxfield from Stoke ended up on the final table three-handed with Tuan Le and another guy who had a piece of Le due to the fact that he had staked him into the tourney where he won his seat(these things can get complicated).

There were a few hands where questionable holdings were folded and aspertions were subsequently cast although having read through the hands at the time I didn't see anything that seemed obviously out of line. However I am a nit of some standing so you may have a completely different opinion if you look up the hands.

Le went on to win it lol.

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xklztx_hasan-habib-vs-tuan-le_videogames

Thanks for finding that.

Having watched it again a few years later I find that play fairly questionable myself now.

Things were different in 2005 obv, but still that's pretty dodgy.

[cambridgealex]

Provoked by the Monte Carlo this weekend, I thought I'd get a thread started about this.

It's commonplace by now for backers to put their horses into comps they themselves are playing in. Often a backer will have many horses playing in an individual event. If the backer goes deep then there's a reasonable chance one of his horses has gone deep too and they end up on the same table.

Now there's plenty of scope for intentional and indeed unintentional collusion.

The most basic scenario is the horse shoves and the backer has a hand strong enough to call and potentially knock out his horse. I don't know what the rules say about collusion but I imagine if caught folding aces, this would be penalised in some way. What about kings? What about more marginal situations where it's close either way?

Where do you draw the line?

If affected in any way by the fact that the player allin is a horse, does this make it collusion?

How is it proven? With the hole card technology used in the MC it makes things more transparent, but even with that, what can be done about it?

Nothing can be done about it as 99% of the time no ones going to see the hole cards anyway. Plus pretty much no-one who's smart enough to have a stable playing in a big live comp would fold aa/kk pre or anything with good equity anyway to their horse as they will always have a bigger incentive financially to win the tournament themselves than to in essence soft-play to their horse.

Similarly, more marginal spots that might be passed up could just be attributed to the lack of point in getting in higher variance spots with capable opponents in a field full of weak droolers.

It's more of an issue when horse has say 200k, Backer has 1m. Horse reships over an open, backer is the big stack and finds AQ/99-JJ. Taking the 200k won't increase his equity in the comp hugely, but taking out the horse will obv reduced the horses equity to 0, so it becomes +EV financially speaking to fold and keep the horse in.

[titaniumbean]

You'd rather have two stacks in play than amalgamate them into 1 stack so there is always going to be issues in this kind of shiz.

[doubleup]

This has been an issue for years and years. Pre-internet in the festivals in Vegas loads of staking went on.  Every now and then it resurfaces as a point of discussion.  The only solution is that any financial interest between players should be declared, but this is very difficult to enforce.

[smashedagain]

Andrews is a good post

[I KNOW IT]

There was a big tourney in '05 I think it was, possibly the Bellagio $25k job that flushy just qualified for.

Anyhow Paul Maxfield from Stoke ended up on the final table three-handed with Tuan Le and another guy who had a piece of Le due to the fact that he had staked him into the tourney where he won his seat(these things can get complicated).

There were a few hands where questionable holdings were folded and aspertions were subsequently cast although having read through the hands at the time I didn't see anything that seemed obviously out of line. However I am a nit of some standing so you may have a completely different opinion if you look up the hands.

Le went on to win it lol.

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xklztx_hasan-habib-vs-tuan-le_videogames

Thanks for finding that.

Having watched it again a few years later I find that play fairly questionable myself now.

When this happened, I posed the question about the incident to Paul Phillips on his blog  

http://extempore.livejournal.com/91375.html

[CHIPPYMAN]

Lol Alex.

Have nice Christmas and new year.

Btw jack got around 275k and still 4 people to

Act after me.

[cambridgealex]

Lol Alex.

Have nice Christmas and new year.

Btw jack got around 275k and still 4 people to

Act after me.

FTR, this thread was inspired by that hand Frankie, but it's not aimed at you AT ALL, just sparked a debate/discussion which interested me.

<3 CHIPPYMAN