PokerStars Eliminates Double-Or-Nothing Sit & Go Tournaments Because of Online Poker Cheating!

The PokerStars VIP Manager posted this stunning news on the 2+2 Poker Forum on Wednesday, saying that as of 15 February, 2011, the hugely popular Double-or-Nothing Sit & Go tournaments will no longer be available on the site. This is directly due to international online poker cheating collusion rings that have been infesting these Double or Nothing Sit and Go tournaments that offer buy-ins ranging from $1 to $1,000.

Why Have These Tournaments Been So Succeptible to Cheating?

Well, first, let's take a look at what a Double or Nothing Tournament is. In short, it is a tournament that awards winning players double their buy-in after half of the players at the table have been knocked out. So a full table of 10 players who each paid a $10 buy-in would award the last five players remaining by allowing them to split the $100 of total buy-ins at that table, their respective chip stacks at the time having no bearing.

During much of last year these Double-or-Nothing Sit & Go tournaments came under intense scrutiny because of highly sophisticated collusion rings operating out of Korea and China that took aim at them. It became evident to online poker security investigators that DoN SNGs were very vulnerable to collusion rings. They could not help but notice the tremendous change in strategies of players such as those not playing many hands during most of a tournament and then in key spots playing almost every hand where lots of raising and re-raising took place.

PokerStars is now offering a form of the Sit & Go Tournament that is similar to Double-or-Nothing called Fifty50. For more on that go to their site.

My take: Well, in spite of the huge popularity of this kind of bankroll-building tournament, PokerStars did what it had to do: combat online poker cheating on every front whenever possible. The only problem is that whenever a new form of online poker tournament is created to ensure less cheating, some sophisticated online cheat team somewhere finds new ways to cheat it.