Poker Stars has recently decided to extend its ban of Josh Fields, known to the online poker community as JJProdigy, from their online poker site to the annual live tournament they run at a Caribbean casino/resort called Atlantis. I’ve got a few thoughts on this that I’ll offer after a quick summary of the situation for those who don’t know:
Summary
Apparently (I was just a small stakes grinder at the time), it was fairly common among successful high stakes multi-table tournament players to enter multiple accounts in the large-field Sunday tournaments. For the most part, the intent seemed to be to have multiple shots at winning one of these very juicy but ridiculously high variance events, not to gain any intrinsic advantage from the unlikely occurrence of having multiple accounts at the same table.
Although this was technically against the rules of all the major online sites, it was very difficult to enforce and seemed to be a pretty widespread practice such that most serious players knew it occurred whether or not they did it themselves. It was not, however, public knowledge.
There’s been a lot of speculation about how unethical this practice is and exactly how much it might really cost other players in terms of their EV. Without getting into that here, I’ll say that in my opinion it’s the equivalent of stealing a few pennies from a few thousand people every week: it doesn’t hurt anyone very much, but it the overall effect is large.
It’s also very bad for the reputation of online poker for stuff like this to be common knowledge. There’s been some disagreement over whether it’s better to keep a scandal like this quiet, and while I certainly recognize why non-cheating professionals feel this way, I can’t endorse it ethically. Recreational (losing) players have a right to know that this is happening and make their own decisions about whether they still want to play, even if we think it’s likely that they will exaggerate and misinterpret the impact to them personally.
Anyway, JJ was the first high-profile player to be exposed for multi-accounting. As a 16-year old, he won nearly $200,000 in the $200 Sunday tournament on Party Poker, only to have the prize confiscated when a friend of his accidentally revealed that he’d entered multiple accounts in this tournament. He was banned from most online poker sites, ostensibly for playing as a minor. Unlike others who were caught since, he has admitted to continuing to cheat by playing on other people’s accounts. He is a well-known staker of a lot of high-profile players and is widely suspected to have won several other large tournaments by taking over for one of his horses deep in the tournament.
My Thoughts
JJ is about to turn 18, and though he hasn’t played (at least under his own name) on Poker Stars since his banning, he was looking forward to attending their tournament at Atlantis, his first live event. He made a pretty transparently self-serving ‘apology’ post on 2+2 (where he used to be a moderator well before this whole thing blew up) that reignited a lot of people’s anger. Shaun Deeb started an email campaign to Poker Stars that resulted in them banning JJ from the Atlantis tournament.
I think this is excellent news for the integrity of the game. There’s a legitimate concern that punishing him anew when he’s finally shown some sign of contrition is counterproductive and likely to drive him and other cheaters underground, but I think the benefits of such a visible punishment far outweigh the costs. Precisely because cheating of this kind can be hard to detect, it is essential to punish those who are caught severely. This logic shouldn’t be lost on any serious tournament player.
Even if the ‘backlash’ argument is true and even if driving cheating underground makes it harder to detect, it is still good for the reputation of the game and essential to decreasing the total amount of cheating. It isn’t a coincidence that JJ was caught because a friend of his had a big mouth. For him to violate his ban, either by using someone else’s account, providing real-time advice to one of his horses, or even taking over for them, he needs the cooperation of others. Anything that forces cheaters to keep a lower profile will make it harder for them to find willing accomplices.
I’m also glad that, to my knowledge, the days of “multi-accounting is rampant and everyone who’s anyone knows it” are over. This environment of implicit consent almost certainly made cheating seem like less of a big deal, since ‘everyone’ was doing it and largely getting away with it. In other words, not only was there no threat of punishment, but it didn’t even ‘feel’ wrong. Banning JJ from the PCA sends a clear statement that neither Poker Stars nor the high-stakes MTT community will tolerate cheating and that getting caught will have real-world consequences for years to come.