Soft Play (Collusion) in Tournaments

[Popped Rod]

[ QUOTE ]
... 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...

[/ QUOTE ]

This doesn't seem to be the same thing. Laying down AA with a medium stack on the bubble is good sattelite strategy.

I'd be more concerned with players donating to the shorties to keep them at the table.

Another form of collusion during a sattelite is for everyone to call a shorty's all-in and all checking down to the river. This increases the possibility that the shorty will bust out against the many opponents.

[Mr Rick]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
... 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...

[/ QUOTE ]

This doesn't seem to be the same thing. Laying down AA with a medium stack on the bubble is good sattelite strategy.


[/ QUOTE ]
I did not give the complete story in my post. In the first case the chat at my table indicated that there was a table that was "colluding" by not playing a hand. So I monitored that table for over 45 minutes (until there were 50 players left and we had all made the semis). The chats exchanged at the "colluding" table were explicit about nobody playing a hand. And there were many of them. Every now and then somebody would say something like "I have KK I don't want to lay it down" and would get responses like "Just do it - we are all going to get into the semis". etc. etc. etc. In the entire time I watched the table, not one player called or raised.

In a second incident, the chat was explicit in trying to recruit everyone at the table to soft play by never calling and raising. There were at least 3 or 4 players actively trying to convince all others to join in. By the time I had contacted Party Poker there was only one guy who didn't want to do it. And my guess is that if Party Poker hadn't shut off the chat for those 3 or 4 players, the last holdout would have been targetted for removal by at least the organizers so they could get on with their cake walk into the semis.

In all, over a 4 week period of time, in roughly 30 of these tourneys I saw this happen at least 4 times - in one case two different tables were doing it in the same tournament.

The funny thing was that one of the tables broke. In those tourneys Party Poker would break tables in reverse numerical order - so if you were on Tables 1-5 you were guaranteed of not breaking. I could see it coming and then was rewarded by one of the organizers landing on my table. He tried to organize our table to collude as well. Aside from calling him a cheater I told him I was actively trying to get him thrown out of the tournament. A few minutes later his chat was turned off and some of the other players started wondering why the guy was no longer "talking". Needless to say it was very satisfying to see him bust out.