Soft Play (Collusion) in Tournaments

[Mr Rick]

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I do not cheat in poker tourneys, but I thought the normal way to go about it was chip dumping to either help team members survive or to build a couple of monster stacks to compete for the big money. Softplaying just maintains the status quo.

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Softplaying maintains the status quo in terms of number of chips for a number of players but they move up closer to or into the money every time somebody else is knocked off.

When I used to play Party Poker they had a lot of freerolls for WSOP entries. 3500 entrants with 50 making the semifinals. In the semis 3500 entries with 25 making the money (15 top prizes of $10,000). Because of the payout structure it was not uncommon to see entire tables towards the bubble of the tournament colluding by never making a bet. And this collusion was overt. You could watch the chat box at the table and see people laughing about laying down AA pre-flop. Party Poker took different approaches to dealing with it based on who was handling the complaint. In one tourney, nobody was penalized and I got an e-mail later stating that "no collusion took place - so there will be no penalties". In another tourney, all chat priviledges were immediately revoked at that table and because there was one holdout the table was not able to collude.

So in this guy's tourney, if the blinds escalate too quickly you could get situations where the final 8-15 guys would chop all prize money - making it profitable for 7 guys to slow play into that situation. There is a thread running right now asking about a 17 way chop at a tourney...