Stay Away From Stake Poker
I made a thread on another part of this forum, maybe this one will get a bit more traffic. Just want to make people aware there is extremely shady things occurring on stake poker.com (the one with Drake as a sponsor). I believe their games are being driven by teams of colluders 24/7 .
I am a casual player who likes to shoot and over the years have accumulated a few hundred k in winnings overall - cash and tournaments, not including buy ins. Only reason I say that is I am definitely not a professional, but also not a complete amateur, it did pay the bills for a while. I feel I have a basic grasp when something isn’t right, without having the means to gather and deploy statistical data to back it up, as I play on my phone app.
My experience is on stake poker and the pattern of seating/joining games and play that is occurring that is highly suspicious and quite frankly alarming. It’s become abundantly clear that there are teams/groups of players driving these games and colluding.
Stake has .50/1 NL 100max and .25/50 $50max. What happens is an initial player of the team will sit alone and open a table and when you join them as the second player, almost immediately a third player will sit to your left. Depending on how it goes more of the same players may join, as many as 5-7 of the same players depending on the time of day. The tactics remain the same, the groupings of players change.They will systematically join to your left.
Once a third player joins, if I sit out, they sit out. Clearly I am marked as a whale which I could care less about. I see them gathered around other solo players as well but they will NEVER join the initial table sitter. Ever. They wait for the “mark” and then the pattern commences.
I have video of this happening when i sit at a table by myself for a while and nobody joins. The moment I sit as the second player to one of these accounts sitting alone within seconds a third player sits boxing me in. I sit out and leave before playing one sits out when I repoen the table.
It’s obvious what is going on.
I open on going tables and see the same groups of players against randoms and when the random loses, they all sit out or leave. Other things I notice is when the marked random folds, they all fold almost instantly, folds or small bets fire around the table (they multi table), but when the mark raises, each players decision almost times out. To me, along with the joining table patterns, indicates communication between these players, quite obviously.
So i understand what is going on, and I can only “assume” from this that they are sharing whole cards and talking on discord? or whatever current means of communication is out there.
Can someone enlighten me. Is this actually cheating or just “unethical”. Is this something that stake should be banning players for? Is this something Pokerstars and GG have evolved to stop and these players just move to the next easy site with fast cashouts to do this until the well runs dry? Is this just the typical poker landscape on newer sites that cannot possible have the proper game integrity to police games adequately to ensure fairness and “fun” for all.
To me, it’s so abundantly clear they are not playing poker independently as it was meant to be played and not joining tables independently.
Pretty sad I cannot enjoy a $1 cash game of poker when this is taking place. Can someone enlighten me on this tactic and the severity of it? Are they using seating scripts or tools?.
Lastly, some of these players are on here 16+ hours a day. I check. Sharing accounts? Botting?
Or is this just 30 friends playing poker on stake.com like the scene from Rounders waiting for the next whale to sit down, only they sit AFTER the whale sits, systematically.
Not sure how to upload video here just to show the hilarity of what happens. They know I know what they are doing because now I just fk with them, sitting out frequently, sit in sit out.
Moral is. DO NOT play on stake poker unless you are part of a team
