[cowpig]

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Honestly, I think that in poker, I'd prefer to play a headsup match against 3 people of equal strength colluding, than one player.

This is very pronounced in blitz chess, when working together with 2-3 people, assuming all are relatively equal strength, generally produces worse results than just playing normally because all the differing viewpoints can be really distracting. At least this has always been my experience.

Whenever I have played poker with someone watching me, it drives me completely insane when they try to give advice that's contrary to what I'm about to do. It's simply impossible to focus when you only have so much time to make a decision.

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I bet if you took a group of three very strong chess players who were close friends, worked on each others' games a lot, and had a lot of experience playing together, that they would play better as a team than individually (assuming this was some version of chess where taking longer on every decision didn't hurt you).

I think, ethically speaking, that it is somewhat shady, but not that bad. I think people can generally assume it's going on at nosebleed stakes, so it isn't super dishonest or anything.

I think what PA does is significantly worse. These guys are still playing on their own accounts, and the owner of the account still has the final say on a given action.