Multiaccounting acknowledged

Last night I picked up the new (April) issue of Poker Pro magazine while at Fitzgeralds. I was surprised, but pleased, to see a feature--mentioned on the cover, no less--about online multiaccounting.

On pp. 32-35 they have short statements from ten online pros. They are of variable quality and depth of thought. The least helpful just sound like PR statements denouncing the practice without ever making clear exactly what is being talked about. But at least a few of them take the trouble to distinguish between simply having more than one account on a site and actually using more than one at a time. Some also make clear that any advantage gained is probably much more important at the higher stakes, and may be negligible at low stakes. (This certainly matches my experience. I think that only a small minority of the opponents I face are capable of noticing playing patterns, remembering them, and adjusting to them. Also, since there is a much larger pool of players at low stakes, the advantages of being disguised are proportionately reduced; most of the time one is facing a table of all unknowns anyway.) A few even acknoweldge that there are ethical "gray areas," where right and wrong are not clear.

It's not anything like a comprehensive discussion of the complex issues involved. For example, nobody mentions that among low-stakes players the most common motivation for opening a second account may be simply to get rakeback, having nothing to do with attempts to hide oneself or deceive opponents or cheat in a MTT. Still, it is something of a milestone merely to have one of the major poker magazines openly admit that the practice is going on. My friend Shamus last year did two thoughtful posts on the tension between poker magazines' roles as reporters of news and as cheerleaders for the game's image, an inherent conflict that is obviously further poisoned by the publications' dependence on the advertising revenues from poker rooms (both B&M and online ones). See here and here. That's why I was surprised to see such frank discussion of the problem in Poker Pro.

Kudos to the editor-in-chief, John Wenzel, for having the courage to acknowledge the elephant in the room.

On a tangentially related note, there is this interesting TED Lecture about research into cheating, and the psychological and social factors that make it not simply a cost-benefit analysis. (Thanks to Cardgrrl for the pointer.)