My first post, cheater concerns

[PossumHopper]

Hi. I was convinced to post today after reading about the Absolute fiasco. Not sure if an "outsider" posting here is flame-bait, but here goes. I'm the kind of player you guys must love. I like to think I'm pretty good but the numbers clearly show I'm not. I'm playing $2.25 turbo SNGs at Tilt and lose -$0.29 a game on average despite being convinced that I'm getting better. Who knows, maybe I am. Ok, you probably could care less about a $2.25 player, I take back that part. But anyway, I was interested in online poker for the idea that you can make a lot in MTTs if you're good and play enough to hold the variance down a bit. Checking out OPR showed me how many people make good money this way, I wanted in. Now, after hearing about a few cheats (this Absolute thing, and apparently WCOOP winner was cheating? Anyone have a link to a thread about what happened there? I'd love to know details) I'm thinking, "ok, for every blatant retard they catch there must be several smarter guys who get away" and suddenly I'm wondering how many first-place finishes are simply out of reach because there will be a cheater taking that spot. And remove first-place finishes and suddenly your ROI is going to drop drastically. For a poor player like me, it makes it clear that I should not aspire to play these high-dollar online MTTs. Yeah, my $2.25 turbo SNGs are fine, I'm sure cheaters may start low like that but the successful ones probably move on at least to $10 or so, low enough to be lost in the endless sea of anonymity but high enough to make some money. I'm happy to lose say 1% of my SNGs to cheaters, or more, even 5%, and I highly HIGHLY doubt its that high. But I've gotta think twice now about heading into MTTs, even the low-dollar ones. You get 1000 people playing and there could well be a cheater or two in there and if a final table spot or two is reserved for cheaters here ... well ... it hurts your ev I'm sure. Enough to make me lose interest. And yeah, I know I'm sounding stupid since I already said I noticed how many people are making reliable income with MTTs, but those guys are probably pretty good players. For someone like me, whose margins are so small, the realization that a significant number of big-$ online MTTs could conceivably be handing first prize over to a cheater ... well, it makes me a lot less eager to work up to those stakes. And yeah, no ones going to care about losing one low-stakes player, but there might be a lot of guys like me who wanted to satellite into some real games who suddenly lost a little interest in the whole scene. Anyway, sorry for so long a post, I just got real discouraged with this cheating story and thought you pros might be interested to hear that it really IS scaring some money away from online poker.

As an aside, I tried to withdraw my $52.28 from UB in light of this (I'll play more at Tilt still ... but maybe not MTTs too much!) and saw, first, that they unashamedly state that they'll keep whatever cents you have in your account indefinately (withdraws have to be $XXXX.00 whole-dollar amounts) and that they won't cut a check for under $100, period. Not having ePassport, it seems like they're planning on keeping the whole thing. I wrote them a letter asking for help, if anyone cares to hear I can post how, if, it gets resolved.