Merry Christmas?
Let's see if I've got this right: Brian Townsend and Cole South shared hands histories with Brian Hastings, who then took a $4 million win against the mysterious high-stakes super-maniac isildur1 at Full Tilt heads-up. Townsend is subsequently suspended one month by Full Tilt for TOS violation: You can't share hand histories on others.
Say what?
Read about these goings-on first at Poker Road just now, which led me to the following Poker News interview. Opinions on this situation, and what "sharing hand histories" means, compared to discussing individual/tournament action(s)? Ah the world of big-time poker; glad I'm happy in Little Land (for now)...
http://www.pokernews.com/news/2009/12/p ... n-7714.htm
-----------
With the tools and such out there in the internet world, I wonder how Full Tilt could hope to instigate such a rule, much less enforce it. I too fear bots and IM hookups and collusion. But studying a player's tendencies away from the actual event ... that's something entirely different. In the current CardPlayer magazine Phil Hellmuth brags of training Jeff Shulman by going over the rest of the November Nine's entire available plays and TV tapes, and immitating the enemy. That sounds like just strategy -- but isn't that just what Townsend and South and Hastings allegedly did?
Gotta make things as black-and-white as possible, because the grays will just be uber-optimized. (Bad wordage but ya know what I mean...)
(... Great cover story on isildur1 and the nosebleed FT heads-ups in above-mentioned CP, and a short blurb that Hastings' big score just happened at presstime.)
1 comment:
The difference with what Hellmuth and Shulman did is that there were not stated rules prohibiting them from doing that during the time between the WSOP ME and the ME final table four months later.
These sites have no other option really other than to post clear rules and then strictly police violators. They did the right thing (short of banning these clowns, which is what they really should do).
Post a Comment