Soft Play (Collusion) in Tournaments

[redfisher]

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For the tournament, we have recently had a group of 7 players consistently enter. These guys always soft play as a team. This last week was painful. 5 made it to the final 7. It was obvious they were not going to enter a large pot with one another. Their only goal was to eliminate the other 2.

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Why do you think this was the wrong strategy for them to take? What are the stack sizes? What's the bubble situation? What's the payout structure?

Why does the fact that 5 of them make the final table make you think they're cheating? This sounds like a home game where somebody found a soft tourney and shared it with his buddies.

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.