2006-02-26 00:04:01
Continued Fall-out From the Multiple Poker Accounts Revelations
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With many in the US government wanting to push through an Internet gambling prohibition bill, it is awfully worrying to me that all of these revelations about people cheating using multiple accounts and especially underage kids playing online poker are surfacing at this time. You don't think that Bob Goodlatte, who is spearheading the pass to push this bill, is going to use this information to his advantage? That this bill must pass so as to insure that underage people can't gambling online? Forget the multiple accounts problem, it will be pretty easy to generate support for this bill by pointing to the case of JJProdigy as a reason that the bill must pass. Here is a 16 year old kid who easily opened multiple accounts at online poker rooms. Surely the US Government must do something!, is what he'll say. And maybe people will support that.
Poker rooms need to go on a search and destroy mission right now, and sacrifice short-term profits in order to protect their long-term businesses. Party Poker has apparently closed a large number of "well-known" player accounts, after concluding that these players had multiple accounts, and were registering them in the same tournaments. I say that Party Poker should publicly name these players, so they can be shamed like JJProdigy and Zeejustin were. Now only will you lose all of your money if you are caught cheating, but you will be embarassed and thrown out of the online poker community.
The underage poker playing is the biggest problem, and the biggest threat to online poker in general. How do you solve this though? I say that each player should have to fax in a copy of his/her driver's license or other piece of ID will their birthdate on it. Someone could always have fake ID, but it will significantly cut down on the number of underage players. I don't mind doing it, cause I really that underage playing is the greatest threat to online poker.
Secondly, poker rooms should come together and exchange information about who is cheating and what should be done about it. If JJProdigy is caught cheating on one site, he should be banned from ALL sites. The poker rooms should share IP address info, etc. in order to make sure that those who cheat can't do so elsewhere.
Thirdly, all cheaters need to be publicly exposed. In addition to banning cheaters from poker rooms, the online poker community as a whole needs to have a chance to publicly tar and feather these cheaters. I mean, these people were cheating their poker playing colleagues out of money, so why shouldn't they face harsh judgment?
Fourth, I believe that any funds seized from cheating players should be paid to some sort of third party company that will communicate between the poker rooms and ensure that all poker rooms have access to information regards cheaters, their email addressses, etc. There should be some sort of centralized database in my opinion.
In my opinion, these would all be good steps to rectifying this problem.
Filed Under: Online Poker Scandals
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