[redfisher]

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Preferential soft playing is collusion, not "maintaining the status quo." When you won't bet against your buddies, but you all play hard against the rest, you are cheating and should be banned. The status of the blinds, antes, bubble, clock, or payouts are irrelevant.

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I agree that preferential softplay is cheating. How are you going to prove it? Many tournament players won't get involved in big pots with other big stacks if it's close to the bubble or a big prize jump. In this case, assume that the evil 5 all have 50 BB stacks while the 2 victims have 4 BB. Which one of the 5 is going to want to be the one who blows up and busts out when there are 2 guys on life support? You don't have to agree that these are good strategies, but you can't ban somebody because they play that way.

Hopefully if OP had some decent evidence of collusion like table talk or the guys splitting the money in the parking lot he'd have mentioned it. Until he gives me specifics of the collusion, I'm not going to assume it's going on. This is a guy who admitted in his second post in the thread that he didn't have any business running a card room.