What is unethical
You know, it seems like every month someone is exposed for crossing some sort of line in a poker game and getting into trouble. People have had money confiscated from accounts, and been banned from sites. The most distrubing thing isn’t that this is going on though. It’s the fact that a lot of people, even those who aren’t being caught, don’t think it’s a big deal. That’s just the weird world of poker. It lives in it’s own little grey world, filled with grey people, doing grey things all the time.
Because of this, there is often no consensus on where a line should be drawn. For example, it’s been ruled that playing multiple seats in the same tournament is not ok. But, if you and your friends each individually enter a tournament, but play out of the same bankroll, that is ok. The distinction is subtle, and at a practical level is close to meaningless. Assuming all play is “honest” what is the difference between ten people each entering the same tournament ten times, and those people each entering ten different tournaments and sharing the results? This sort of stuff has been going on forever. Men ‘The Master’ has made a fortune out of doing this, yet he and his horses are still allowed to play at any tournament that they like.
So when it comes to the new breed of players getting caught red handed, I can certainly understand how they slipped down that slope. There are just so many examples of poker biggest and brightest — from authors to champions to internet pros — bending, twisting, and cajoling the rules to suit their own personal needs and desires that it almost seems like it’s part of the game. That doesn’t make it all right though.
The problem is that without clear rules and guidelines, players looking for an edge will do everything they can in order to make it as large as possible. This takes all kinds of forms, from coffeehousing to shorting chips, from active collusion to shared bankrolls. What is fair and what is not when it comes to poker? It’s a hard question to answer, and it’s one that a lot of smart people have come to very different conclusions about.
May 14th, 2006 at 8:12 am
Hammer on the head dude.
See: http://www.wpapoker.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=23&highlight=
May 14th, 2006 at 9:28 am
Have to be a member to read the WPA Forum, but not to read this:
http://www.wpapoker.com/committees/ethics.php
But Andrew, you’re pretty much a cash-only, not tournament, player, right?
May 14th, 2006 at 9:39 am
These sort of issues permeate all of poker. They may be surfacing in tournament poker right now, but that’s most likely because tournament poker is in the public eye right now. In fact, one of the reasons that I play online instead of live is that I’m more familiar with the shady things that people are doing online as opposed to what they are doing live. Thus, I’m better able to deal with the practical ramifications of what’s going on.
As far as whether I’m a tournament or cash game player, it’s true that I play more ring games than tournaments, but I play both, and have had enough success in each that I’m concerned about the behaviour of players across the board.
May 14th, 2006 at 10:18 pm
The only reason I mentioned the tournament v. cash issue is that the WPA is a tournament poker trade association.
May 16th, 2006 at 10:11 am
Amy Calistri and I interviewed ZeeJustin on our Internet radio show, “Keep Flopping Aces.” He is very repentent and trying to rehabilitiate his reputation, though he seems not to even be aware of how he began his slide into unethical behavior.
Your comment on Men the Master was very interesting to me, because you focused on Men and his horses, not on Men and allegations of chip dumping and passing chips to one another during breaks and that sort of thing. I don’t know if the chip passing has ever been proven, but it’s almost poker folklore by now.
June 30th, 2006 at 10:16 am
How did I not find this until now?
Of course I agree with all you say, and particularly liked the “grey people” imagery.
Given that poker has always been grey at best, and factoring the huge growth of tournaments and particularly, the demographic where much of that growth comes from (young single men) I have great difficulty believing there aren’t a multitude of cheating packs out there right now. Given the money and celebrity potentials (for people with no potential like that anywhere else), how could there NOT be a huge amount of soft-type cheating going on, and probably also a considerable number of hardline cheating.
Makes me not want to really play much poker anymore. Oh, wait, I don’t. Lucky me.
July 22nd, 2006 at 8:49 am
bed chair folding
I would love to hear more about this …
August 16th, 2006 at 2:40 pm
Hey Andrew, there must be two comments in queue (for moderation, or whatever it is that WordPress did with them) for your most recent post. One is a duplicate because the first one didn’t post, so I tried to comment it again without success… so, approve those to be posted on the most recent post if you can (I’m guessing the WordPress spam filter is catching my follow-up clarification comment), and delete this (you don’t have your email address on this blog, so I’m just commenting here to contact you). Thanks :)