Serious allegations of collusion have been made over play at the Turbo Series final table on PokerStars. Event #11 took place on April 6th 2020 and eagle-eyed viewers spotted some inconsistencies in the play of two players that were worthy of investigation.
Collusion at Pokerstars?
The allegations are directed at players ”M Cunha G” and ”BrunoBoucas”, both hailing from Brazil. They are reputed to belong to the biggest poker stable in the country, 4bet Poker Team.
The first point to note is that collusion in events where there are replays available is highly risky. This is the case here, but one hand in particular stands out as almost undefendable.
The following hand begins at 38:11 in the video replay at the bottom of the page.
”M Cunha G’ min raises with ace-king offsuit first to act in the cutoff with a 21 big blind stack. The button folds with a 11 big blind stack and ”BrunoBoucas” jams pocket aces with almost a 21 big blind stack.
”M Cunha G” tanks and incredibly makes an insane fold.
Anybody watching the replay for the first time will without a shadow of a doubt be thinking collusion. What other explanation could there be?
ICM at Work or Collusion?
To add context to what is happening, it is important to understand how ICM – independent chip modelling – works in a tournament scenario.
Because of a sometimes large difference between pay jumps players must tighten up considerably because in effect they are risking too much for the chips on offer.
This is what ”M Cunha G” argues is happening in this case. Simply, the presence of the short stack is enough to make such a tight fold in his opinion. However, this was certainly not the opinion of most of the participants in a 2+2 thread on the matter.
Other hands of note in the replay were described by the thread starter on 2+2.
“At 2:02 both played very passively with strong hands.
38:53, what could be considered a standard resteal is played passively when Bruno has a strong hand.
40:14, M Cunha didn’t seem to mind restealing a much weaker hand than A7s when the last one in chips is even shorter than the previous hand.
What do you think 2p2? Is the AK hand enough evidence? If it isn’t, do you think the other 3 hands are suspicious or are they standard plays?”
The Stable – Collusion Issue
In recent years poker stables have become a fast-growing industry. Unlike in the early years of the poker boom the insane variance of tournament poker is now well understood.
For this reason many tournament players prefer to play with somebody else’s money even if that means they only collect half of the profits. This sounds like a good deal if you get some regular coaching.
The problem for many people is that the stables are now being thought of as a net negative when it comes to game integrity.
Do fellow stable members play soft with each other? This is certainly one common accusation
Many in the 2+2 thread think that stables should even be banned due to obvious collusion.
Another relevant point came to light when an unnamed stable was accused of having mandatory ghosting in their terms and conditions for membership.
This means that any deep runs by a weaker player will have experts on hand to play the important final stages. This is obviously against any kind of ethics in online poker.
Check out the latest poker news to see what’s been happening and to hear when live poker might be starting up once again.
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