Cheating?

I was just checking PokerNews for updates on what's going on at the WSOP, and noticed in the margin a feed of Tweets from various pros, including one that mentioned an accusation of cheating. That's a subject that always interests me, so I looked into it a bit more. (This just happened within the past hour, so not much information yet available.)

You can see the relevant posts from Twitter below. Click to see it full size, then read from the bottom up.

In short, Christian Harder had a new player moved to his table, apparently thought he was pretty good, but didn't recognize him. He snapped a photo with his cell phone and posted it on Twitter, asking if anybody could give him a name or tell him something about his play.

This resulted in a couple of followers suggesting that such fishing for information on an opponent was "cheating," to which Harder responded with scornful dismissal.

I, too, am hard-pressed to see how it constitutes cheating. I don't suppose that one player has an intrinsic right to demand to know the name of another at his table, but he can ask. Or he can ask the player next to him, "Do you recognize that guy?" There can't possibly be anything wrong with that.

This is just taking the quest for identification a step further--but it's a difference in scope, not in kind. Suppose he had a friend who is a whiz at recognizing poker players and did the same thing by private messaging, rather than being open on Twitter. Would that be cheating? Again, I don't see how. What if that friend happened to be on the rail, easily accessible between hands? Or even happened to be sitting in the adjacent seat?

Disclosure: As I mentioned in my post Friday, some of my friends and readers helped me figure out who a couple of people at my table were; one I requested (I asked who Greg Raymer had meant in his Tweet by the nickname "Oogee"), others were volunteered to me. I have also done other similar things in the past. For example, a couple of times when a skilled, difficult player at a cash game has mentioned that he or she is from Washington, D.C., I have discreetly snapped a photo and sent it to Cardgrrl, asking if she recognizes the player, hoping for some background information. She has done the same with me when in cash games in town here. I suppose I might be accused of conveniently coming down on Harder's side here in order to cover my own butt. But that reverses causality. Until this afternoon, it never dawned on me that there was anything unethical about it, and I share Harder's surprise that somebody would go so far as to call it cheating.

I have also occasionally asked my friends in the poker media (who have a much bigger mental database of pro player names and faces than I do) if they recognized somebody, and never thought I was doing anything wrong. (To those friends: If you feel that I put you in an awkward situation with such inquiries, please tell me. I promise to accept your viewpoint, not argue about it, and refrain from making such requests of you in the future.) When Cardgrrl was playing in her WSOP HORSE event last year, one of our media friends just casually mentioned to her on a break who a couple of the players were that we hadn't recognized. I didn't think there was anything wrong with this, and the friend who did it is a 100% ethical straight-shooter who I am positive would not have said anything if he thought it was even a gray area. One of the ones named in that example was Jose "Nacho" Barbero, who had won two LAPT main events in South America over the preceding few months, a rather remarkable accomplishment. He hadn't yet risen to my threshold of awareness (or Cardgrrl's, as I recall), but it's likely that a large percentage of the players he faced knew perfectly well who he was. It's really hard for me to imagine how sharing such widely-available information violates any rule or ethical standard.

It's true that the identification of a less-known player is information that some have and others don't, which I suspect is the root observation behind the notion that going out of one's way to gain that information is cheating. But it's information that is, in many cases, out there, possessed by people both at and away from the table. It seems to me completely different than if, say, I had a friend who was in the ESPN editing booth with access to the hole card camera feed, and had him text me with details on how an opponent was playing. That would be information available to no other player except by deliberate and elaborate frustration of the security procedures erected precisely to prevent its dissemination.

I wish those who think that Harder's query constitutes cheating would find some forum on which to explain in more detail what, exactly, they find troubling about it, and where they would draw the line. If it's not OK for me to ask somebody remotely for help in recognizing a new player to the table, is it OK to ask the guy sitting next to me? If so, what's the difference? If not, how could you ever hope to enforce such an extreme restriction on sharing of information?