Legend5555
Full House
The biggest takeaway IMO from all of this is that high stakes online is going to go extinct at some point. While I think there is cheating at the lower stakes, it's inherently not going to be as rampant since the cheaters will move up in stakes and the player pool is much larger. I don't think micro stakes players have a ton to worry about.
What I found very interesting from Berkey's video is the take on ghosting. Having played a lot in the early days of online poker, ghosting was just a thing you did. My college roommate and I just always have each other input while playing. It wasn't much different in our minds than watching someone play an FPS online and making suggestions.
It's wrong in the sense that in live play, you could never do it: one player to a hand. But online, this is basically impossible to enforce. While I get it's wrong in theory especially when viewed from a line poker POV, online is very different. And trying to make illegal and punishable something you can't enforce in almost anyway seems like a tough sell to me.
It's a very gray area, because one person helping out or watching another in a $11 tournanent when both are recs seems pretty harmless, though obviously wrong in a live poker POV. It's sharing an experience. I'm not sure where you start to draw the line though. What Bryn's stable was doing was for more nefarious as it was essentially everyone sharing three play and the profits. It's not like the $11 player was going to share his profits with the watcher.
I hate to say "if everyone is doing it then it's okay to do it to." But ghosting is such a hard thing to accurately define. And since it has basically has no evidence trail, and it's inherently a part of online gaming, I find it hard to come down really hard on the idea of ghosting. I imagine we've all ghosted by Berkey's definition. And while I don't do it anymore, it's not exactly because I wouldn't do it. It's just that I'm not in a spot where the opportunity to do it arises. But my wife and I occasionally play online with each other around playing $5 -$20 tournies. And we ask each other's opinions in some spots. But we also aren't playing for a living. So I have a hard time with treating all ghosting the same.
What I found very interesting from Berkey's video is the take on ghosting. Having played a lot in the early days of online poker, ghosting was just a thing you did. My college roommate and I just always have each other input while playing. It wasn't much different in our minds than watching someone play an FPS online and making suggestions.
It's wrong in the sense that in live play, you could never do it: one player to a hand. But online, this is basically impossible to enforce. While I get it's wrong in theory especially when viewed from a line poker POV, online is very different. And trying to make illegal and punishable something you can't enforce in almost anyway seems like a tough sell to me.
It's a very gray area, because one person helping out or watching another in a $11 tournanent when both are recs seems pretty harmless, though obviously wrong in a live poker POV. It's sharing an experience. I'm not sure where you start to draw the line though. What Bryn's stable was doing was for more nefarious as it was essentially everyone sharing three play and the profits. It's not like the $11 player was going to share his profits with the watcher.
I hate to say "if everyone is doing it then it's okay to do it to." But ghosting is such a hard thing to accurately define. And since it has basically has no evidence trail, and it's inherently a part of online gaming, I find it hard to come down really hard on the idea of ghosting. I imagine we've all ghosted by Berkey's definition. And while I don't do it anymore, it's not exactly because I wouldn't do it. It's just that I'm not in a spot where the opportunity to do it arises. But my wife and I occasionally play online with each other around playing $5 -$20 tournies. And we ask each other's opinions in some spots. But we also aren't playing for a living. So I have a hard time with treating all ghosting the same.
