Online poker scandals of the past decade: Chinese Collusion Team

One of the more recent scandals that shook the online poker world dealt with collusion, and unlike the strategic –some would say soft-collusion– that took place in the StoxTrader scandal, in this case the players’ involved shared information and weren’t looking for a small added edge; these players were actively looking to cheat other players out of their money.

The collusion team targeted Double or Nothing Sit and Go Tournaments on PokerStars in the $50-$100 range, and allegedly made off with some $587,000 in profits -not to mention FPP’s and other incentives.

The Crime

What happened in this case was that several dozen players from the Chinese town/region of Hangzhou formed a collusion pack, where multiple members of the pack would register in the same Double or Nothing Sit & Go tournament on PokerStars -typically five or more of the players from the team would enter the same tournament. The collusion team would then share information about their hands, and employ tactics that gave them a huge edge over the other players in the tournament.

Collusion is a very difficult form of cheating to catch, and unfortunately if it is done right collusion can go undetected indefinitely. What brings colluders down is greed and stupidity. In this case the collusion team was caught because their statistics were so far from the norm that the poker playing community realized something was amiss. The fact that 5+ players in a Sit & Go hailed from the same area of China -not widely considered a poker playing hotspot–points to their carelessness and stupidity.

The Fallout

The cheaters were discovered after numerous complaints by poker players to PokerStars support team. Strangely, one of the team’s members went on the 2+2 poker forum and complained about a frozen account and seized funds! One respondent in the thread had this to say: “Ya finally got busted huh? Well it’s about time. I sent about 25 emails complaining about you ****ing clowns.”

To date, PokerStars has seized some $85,000 from the members of the collusion team, and has paid out some $587,000 to the affected players.

Hopefully this incident, and others, shows the online poker rooms that their internal audits and security teams need to be upgraded. With so many players complaining about the collusion team members it’s hard to understand how their tactics could not be quickly revealed. Obviously hiring competent statisticians, computer security experts, and the like would be an expensive proposition, but the major sites are definitely bringing in enough money to start upgrading their in-house staff.