At the end of April, poker rooms were flooded with angry players who were talking about a scam on Microgaming. User “dbuk1” started a thread on the highstakesdb.com forum. He became the victim of scammers, who seized 12 000 euros. Recently D.Bull (dbuk1) requested Microgaming to provide him some statistical data.
The letter he sent is as follows:
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SIT AND COLLUSION PLEASE READ
The players alias on microgaming are all suspected/confirmed by 24 hour poker as collusion cheats.
gisemvan
rimro3s
33parrots
maratGleb
popvita1
artturq
SinVillage
SotVanNuc
1vilkone
Ask4Me
Your site has shown that they were all playing the same stakes at the same time at the end of march. They were manipulating their finishing postions so they could top a sng challenge leaderboard. This is cheating. Can you confirm that these players were all playing the same sit and goes together using your tracking software.
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As it can be seen, dbuk1 accused players of participating in team play. He came to a conclusion that several poker players registered on the same S&G tournaments, shared information about hands and dumped chips to each other.
Macropoker was the only one site where it was possible to see the results of suspected players. Other poker stats websites closed stats of the players for unknown reasons.
Here are the results of our investigation:
The legend:
Figures – the player participated in tournaments and finished in the money
Black color – the player participated in tournaments but didn’t finish in the money
The list of all suspected players with stats:
— gisemvan (played the 11€ streak)
— rimro3s
— popvita1
— maratGleb (played the 11€ streak)
— 33parrots (played the 11€ streak)
— artturq (switches limits with 33parrots as soon as he had the 5€ streak in his bag) http://macropoker.com/en/stats#q:pok...artturq&room=8
— SinVillage (played the 11€ streak)
— SotVanNuc (played the 11€ streak)
— 1vilkone (played the 11€ streak)
— Ask4Me (played the 11€ streak)
Between 27th March and 1st April (suspected players have played neither before nor after) one or more of the suspected players played in 224 S&G tournaments. Most tourneys (147) had 2 or more suspected players sign up. Most tournaments were 9-max, but roughly 20% of S&G were 6-max.
You can see from the table (tournaments are sorted by date from the left to the right) that the quantity of the players who played tournaments together was constantly increasing. This is one of the most important proofs of cheating. Player “atturq” started playing by himself. Then he was joined by other suspicious players. 31st March – 1st April 8 users from the list registered on the same tournaments (well, there was no need to occupy all 9 seats).
Here’s another interesting fact: rimro3s and popvita1 played together for 40 tournaments in a row (6-max S&G). They finished 1st and 2nd on 30 of those tournaments. Something like that can’t really be explained with wonderful upstreak. We believe that they used team play to gain an advantage. Even when they didn’t finish in the money, 1st or 2nd place were grabbed by another suspicious player – rimro3s.
It is clear that in the very beginning the cheaters were able to try different schemes. They probably wanted to find the best possible way to cheat. However, their opponents suffered heavily. The overall buy-in cost for tournaments affected exceeded 10 000 euros! Cheaters were unable to finish in Top-2 on just 2 out of 147 tournaments.
Dbuk1 and other active forum users made this scam evident. We are pleased that Microgaming admitted cheating and paid the victims the money promised. We hope that this fact was revealed by security service of Microgaming. However, the activity of dbuk1 and other users of highstakesdb, 2+2 and other forums contributed to speeding up the process.
Therefore, we ask that you tell us about any suspicious facts and start new threads on poker forums should you encounter a situation like this one. You will help the poker community to reveal cheaters. Macropoker.com is always ready to help in providing poker stats. We don’t tolerate any scammers or bots either.
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