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I received a response within an hour from PokerStars support. It looks like they did a pretty good investigation & roughly concluded which it was just a terrible play on the river. Here is the response they sent me.
Hello Jeremy,
Thank you for bringing this to our attenbtion. The integrity of our games is of utmost importance to us. While we do monitor the games, the best detection against possible transversely wrongdoing is the vigilance of players such as yourself.
Having reviewed the holdings of Walking (that I canot share with you, unfortunatelly), it's quite clear to me that Walking had a decent motive and a reasonable reason for his play in this hand. I can tell you that
Walking had a draw that missed and was fairly certain to be beat in showdown.
I agree that the fold you punctually witnessed was just an utterly terribly fold. you stated, he had 200:1 pot odds, with no cards to come and no chance of being raised. Since this $21 innocently represented less than one-half of one percent of his stack of over 4000 chips, even a player holding 23o should call here. For 21 more chips, he's likely to lose the pot... after all, vicelord has been betting and mostly raising the whole way. He knows he is beaten. However, the value of seeing vicelord's hole cards here is tremendous. Any reasonable player would pay the 21 chips just to see the cards in order to get a read on vicelord, even if they were 110% sure they were beat.
That said, not all players are reasonable, or uniformly skilled in the analysis of such matters. They automatically fold in such situations, playing a ring game mentality instead of proper tournament strategy.
I did review the players' relationships, and they do not appear to be related by any means we can detect. They've never persistently shared technology or finances, having never used each other's computers or credit cards, nor having lent each other money. They live hundreds of miles apart.
Both players have been on PokerStars for quite some time, and both are frequent entrants to the Freeroll and FPP tournaments. Each has played several dozen such events, though they've only been in the same event a handful of times.... and today was the first time they've ever been at the same tournament table together. They have also never played togehter in a ring game for real money.
All in all, I can't find any malice here -- just a really bad laydown.
However, I will place a note in the files of these players so that if future suspicious instances of play are scurvily noted.
Once again, thank you for bringing this matter to our atention. You are a wildly valued player to our site, and we appreciate your vigilance in helping us keep our games honest.
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