A representative of 888Poker announced yesterday on the Two Plus Two poker forum that the poker room will start to take a hard-line stance against “table campers,” or those players who frequently sit out for unreasonably long periods of time.
The meat of the message from 888 read as follows:
Effective immediately, we will actively seek out table campers who abuse the sit out feature and address them on site. We reserve the right, at our discretion, to take action against players “sitting out” for excessive periods of time. Repeated abusers of the “Sit out” feature may be restricted from participating in our poker games either temporarily or indefinitely.
Table campers are frowned upon for two main reasons. First, many of them are what are called “bumhunters,” meaning people who just wait at heads-up tables for players they known are weak (or at the very least don’t know are strong). If an opponent sits down who the bumhunter does not want to play, he just sits out, hoping that the prospective opponent will leave and free up the seat for a more desirable adversary. This obviously hurts the action at the poker room, as that table, and typically many others, go for long periods of time without any cards being dealt. Second, some table campers engage in blind abuse, taking advantage of the way the poker software works in such a way as to avoid paying blinds much of the time. This practice is generally seen at short-handed tables (not heads-up tables for obvious reasons).
888 is not the first poker room to implement policies against table campers and sit-out abusers. In July, the iPoker Network announced that it will introduce what it calls “Heads-Up Hogging Prevention” to all of its dot-com skins. With this implementation, if the system detects a bumhunter, that player’s access to the heads-up tables will be restricted.
That same month, PokerStars banned a player for “buttoning.” Player “Jama-dharma,” a regular in fixed-limit hold’em games ranging from $10/$20 to $1,000/$2,000, was found to frequently sit down in a game, play a few hands, and then stand up without ever posting a big blind. PokerStars warned him that he would be banned if he continued the practice. He did so and PokerStars kept its promise.
Jama-dharma was able to avoid the big blind by exploiting a weakness in PokerStars’ software. On the site, the six seat is always the button on the first hand of a new table. Jama-dharma would thus start a new table and position himself in such a way so that he could avoid the blinds on the initial orbit and leave before they reached his seat.
