Originally Posted by eroswebmaster

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?"