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Chinese Cheaters Outed at PokerStars

August 20, 2010

According to the 2+2 forum, a recent scandal on PokerStars resulted in the discovery of a Chinese collusion ring, which led to a $2 million refund to affected players. The popular poker forum revealed that there were multiple Chinese players registering for the same Double or Nothing (DoN) sit and go tourneys around the $52 to $104 buy-ins. These single-table tourneys start out with 10 players and the last five players standing cash out with double the buy-in.

In the case of the Chinese cheaters, the players would reveal to each other their hole cards and purposely exchange piles of chips to ensure they’d cash out winners. These guys’ ironically outed by one of their own. One of the players, “Jane0123” posted a thread in May that stated PokerStars had suspended his account and frozen the $10K in it. This was the resulted of regular DoN players reporting to PokerStars that something seemed fishy.

A month later, PokerStars paid out just under $600K to affected players, but Stars players demanding more, and the reparations were recently upped to $2 million. Although the online poker site has done much to amend the issue, there still seems to be a problem. 2+2 posters have still reported new accounts held by Chinese players with similar playing styles to that of the collusion ring in tournaments and 7-card stud games.

While the problem is obviously far from over, there is likely to be some sort of policy put in place to prevent this from happening in the future, as it seems like this practice has become an epidemic that will hopefully be contained very soon. This isn’t the first time that online poker has been the center of a scandal, but the PokerStars brand name and reputation is now tarnished. However, Stars is much too big an empire to allow such a negative connotation to be associated with their brand as say UltimateBet, which ultimately re-branded as UB.com in an effort to save what little dignity they had left.

Written by Marcus · Filed Under Poker News 

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