Online poker rooms are constantly on the lookout for cheaters (or so they claim), but historically, the best sleuths come from the poker community at large. The gigantic “super user” scandals that rocked the online poker world a number of years ago, for example, were discovered by suspicious players (with a little help from a complete hand history that was accidentally e-mail by a poker room’s customer support). While nothing has been proven yet, another poker player believes he has found evidence of a collusion ring on partypoker.
A poster going by the screen name “FarseerFinland” on Two Plus Two and “DukeofSuffolk” on partypoker, provided the poker community his story over the weekend, explaining what he saw in some multi-table tournaments.
On October 18th, he made the final table of the Wednesday Turbo High Roller tournament and finished in the top four (he doesn’t say specifically where he placed, but he said he busted three of the final six and was eventually knocked out himself, so he was at least fourth). It was that final table that aroused his suspicion.
According to Farseer, in the 48 hands he played in which he infers there were a lot of all-ins, none of his six opponents ever called any all-in by one of the others. Then, we he busted out, he noticed that the tournament only took three more minutes to complete. The assumption here is that since he believes the players were colluding, they just quickly finished it up and split their winnings.
He investigated the players further using third-party sites that track tournaments and saw that six of the top seven players in the tournament all launched their accounts this year and generally play the same types of tournaments. In August, they all played solely the “Clubber II” tournaments, though they didn’t all play the same number of them.
A couple days later, Farseer saw that all six of the alleged colluders joined the same high roller tournament; four of them hadn’t even played any tournaments since the last one he observed. Farseer did not play and was unable to determine if there was any collusion by observing. He also watched a couple other high roller tournaments and found eight more players with a “similar tournament” history to the first six alleged colluders.
Between the two days during which he observed what he believes was fishy play, Farseer contacted partypoker support to report his findings. To their credit, partypoker did say they were opening an investigation.
Now, I would not normally report on a bunch of collusion speculation, especially because poker players always think someone is cheating them. This case seems to have legs, though, as on October 22nd, Farseer said that partypoker told him that the accounts in question had been suspended pending an investigation (though at least one still appeared active). That partypoker would even take it that far may indicate they are seeing something, as well.
On Tuesday, October 24th, a partypoker representative posted in the thread on Two Plus Two to mention that she has spoken with Farseer and that “all details have been shared with the Risk team management for review.”
