Quote:
Originally Posted by RawAlex
You guys are both missing the point. Collusion between players is the end user's version of cheating. It is easy to do, and can actually be profitable, just by moving the risk ever so slightly.
That is the small end of the stick.
the RNG has little or nothing to do with it. Let's say you are a poker site. You spike every big game with a half a dozen players for "the house". They might even be automated for all that matters. You feed those players all of the information about what is going on at the table, and because the deck is in theory pre-shuffled, you can even reveal all the cards that will come out. Those players can then choose to play winning hands when they will win, and be able to call out bluffers without an issue. They can also even lose hands when there isn't many chips in the pot, just to look good.
At the end of the day, you end up from, say 200 players in a $100 per seat tourney with 10 players at a final table and say 6 of them are house players. They all then lose out over the next little while, taking 10th, 9th, 7th, 5th, 4th, and 2nd. All that money goes directly to the company instead of back to players.
Instead of the $5 fee to enter the game ($1000 for the house) they also took in about 30-40% of the total prize pool, or $6,000 - $8,000. Suddenly, running a poker room is very profitable indeed. Do that 10 times per day, and there is an extra 30 millions dollars in it for you.
Doubly more important if the money isn't going to the company but the the main partner's personal off shore accounts.
you have to think big  |
one thing you're missing is that people who play online, are aware of others who play online. If all of a sudden even just 1 player wins multiple times, and the top MTTers online don't know who he/she/it is, they are going to start asking questions.
You're trying to think big, but I think you're missing some key numbers here.
Let me give you a quick example. A $200 buy-in tournament with $15 juice to the house on Pokerstars had 1,639 players involved.
Pokerstars made $24,585 off of that one tournament alone.
Tournaments are all top heavy when it comes to pay structures.
1st was $72K, 2nd was $42K, 3rd was $27K.
They make $24K without the same overhead as a live tournament has. They of course have servers / bw, but there are no dealers, or floor that a % of that goes to.
So, why try to make an additional $27K by putting a bot into 3rd place, when all they have to do is run another tournament..which if you log onto any poker site they have them running all day long. This does not take into account the rake from cash games...how about the ungodly juice on a low limit SnG, which if you open up pokerstars you will see up to 100's of just $5.50's running per hour...that doesn't include the $10's, $20's etc.
Once again, there is no reason to blow $24K a day to make an additional $27K a day...and I'm telling you...if the sites tried, they would not get away with it for long.
There are far too many people who do this for a living, who follow the stats of other players...sites that track this shit too like SharkScope. Hendonmob, and many others...when 1 player wins one of these big events and no one knows who he is...the forums light up asking..."who the fuck is this?"