[trixtrix]

There has to be a deterrent to fraud. If you play at a casino where you are trespassed, you go to jail.

do you get paid in full from the casino though?

and really, define the phrase "going to jail", is spending maybe the night at the precint w/ your full winnings really that bad of a deal?

[tomcowley]

There are many more ways to ID fraud than just IP checks. Are you suggesting that every book should have a dedicated staff to search for fraudulent sign ups from the start? I don't think this is a reasonable burden to put on a book, when it will cost 2% as much to do during cashouts.

To get to the level of ironclad proof for sequential multiaccounting, they need some kind of duplicate information on signup, a duplicate IP, duplicate computer info like iesnare, or some kind of private investigator work (or a guy dumb enough to call up and have his voice on tape on 2 accounts). I would expect that most people who would be caught by duplicate info would be caught immediately, and most of those who were only "caught" later wouldn't rise to the level of ironclad proof without a serious screwup- which would be caught by the same automatable queries anyway.

It's basically no burden at all to run a script that checks every new signup for similar/duplicate personal info and every login for duplicate IP/iesnare. Soft cases like same street/last name/zip or same pw/city could be looked at by a person, but really, flagging a small handful of accounts on signup and verifying them isn't much of a burden.

[tomcowley]

And our favorite nazis are at it again, showing once again why a trivial automated check is clearly proper policy.

[TLD]

Hypothetical case:

I play at a neighborhood poker game. There is a very sharp player who also occasionally plays there. A couple times he talked me into playing heads up and cleaned my clock.

I decided at that point not to play against him ever again. In fact I even told him, “Man, you’re too good for me. I refuse to play against you any more.” He soon disappeared from our game.

A year or so later, there was a stranger at our game. When the game broke up, he wanted to keep playing, so he and I played heads up for awhile. He won big.

As I was reaching in my pocket to pay him, I looked more closely and realized it was the same guy from before that I had decided not to play against any more. He had grown a beard, and he was wearing dark glasses, and he had introduced himself by a different name, but I’m confident it was the same guy.

He in no way cheated or anything when we played heads up. But he knew going in I wouldn’t have agreed to play him if I’d recognized him.

May I stiff him?

My answer: No. I’m under no obligation to play poker against him or anyone else. I can decide I don’t want to play against smart people, or women, or tall people, or people named Fritz, or this specific individual, etc. But if I do play against such people and lose, I have to pay. It’s not my opponents’ responsibility to make sure I know that they fall into a category I don’t want to play against; that’s on me to find that out if the information is relevant to me.

This is different from someone dealing off the bottom of the deck or anything like that. Here we’re not talking about cheating; we’re talking about someone I’d prefer not to play against but I ended up doing so anyway.

I lost. I owe.

Same thing with the classic pool hustle. If you’re in a pool hall and someone tricks you into thinking they’re not as good as they are, or they’re suffering from a wrist injury that affects their game when they’re actually not, or they’re not world famous pool expert Wisconsin Fats when in fact they are, and they talk you into playing them for money and you lose, you owe. Period. Yeah, he’s a hustler and that’s not a particularly nice thing he did to you, but when you lose a bet to a hustler you still lost the bet. It’s still welching if you don’t pay.