Further Into Fantasy Land
Short Answer -- The poker rooms are raking $500,000+ PER DAY!!! If cheating gets out of hand, they can kiss that goodbye. They are going to do their best to keep things honest and keep the half million a day rolling in.
Also, they have to protect themselves. The things to make collusion happen can also make it easy for things like credit card fraud (They lose money!!), chip dumping, money laundering, being a conduit for illegal drug money transactions, etc., etc. and this will kill that $500,000 a day golden goose also. So they are going to protect themselves, and you along with it.
Long Answer -- Okay, now we got one guy playing 4 seats at the same table.
SO the guy needs to contact a couple of ISP's and set up multiple accounts, maybe have one computer going thru dial-up even. (try to set up multiple accounts and sit at the same table, go ahead, try it.) The software doesn't allow multiple seats from the same computer/server/IP ADDRESS at the table, you are going to have to use different internet providers at the very least.
Of course, he needs to have a couple of fictious names and address to set up these accounts, it would be kind of a red flag to have all 4 of these "different" guys playing at the same table, living at the same address and having the same real name.
Now to fund these 4 different accounts, you need to set up 4 phoney bank accounts with the fictious names and addresses (banking information must match playing account information) and get the bank to issue credit cards for the account. Playing for high stakes, you will get a call from the Poker Room to verify your identity, so better have a couple of different people around to answer the phone just in case they realize they keep talking to the same person when they call 4 different people. (Oh, yeah -- you are going to need 4 different phone numbers, I mean, how easy would duplicate numbers be to cross check on a computer database?)
So we will ignore that now the guy has 4 phoney identities, 4 bank accounts with these identities, 4 addresses and phone numbers, etc. and isn't there something more lucrative he could illegally be doing with all that rather than scamming a few thousand off some poker suckers, nevermind, poker is the plan!
So he plops his 4 identities down at the table. Now all he has to do is find suckers who are going to play against these 4 guys. The 4 guys who always play together. The 4 guys who never seem to play by themselves. The 4 guys who, if you see one, you see all four, always at the same table, same time. If one quits, pretty shortly they all quit, and when one shows up, the other three aren't far behind. Never play seperately at other tables. Yeah, those 4 guys. You betcha -- I'm going to hop right in and play them high stakes regularly, yep.
Of course, as soon as someone notices some fishy play -- like one guy betting into the other guy raising and then folding -- and colluding crap like that -- 1 e-mail to the Poker Room, just 1 e-mail -- and unlike a real poker room where the poker room manager might notice that he has seen those guys play together sometime in the past maybe -- No, they got a history of every hand that every guy has ever played. And they can pour over that hand history, not think they remember something similar last Tuesday, but actually statistically analyse, and see how often one guy raised and folded with nothing since he has played from DAY 1. How many times he has played with Tom, Dick, and Moe -- How often he raised with nothing when the other guy had the nuts and was able to re-raise -- with the advantage of seeing ALL the cards, ALL the times, no matter when any of the players mucked.
At this point, it doesn't matter if it is 1 guy or 4 real guys colluding -- 2 of your 4 guys just had all their funds seized. You lost half your team, hope 1 of those guys wasn't the one that had the major winnings dumped on -- you just lost it. Better get busy setting up some new addresses, phones, bank accounts, etc.
Oh, and if you are playing really really high stakes at one of the majors -- you will get a phone call from the card room manager to check you out -- and you don't need to worry waiting for some one to report collusion -- the games are monitored automatically.
