Poker: On how shockingly lax tournaments are on cheating / assistance

The Game Room
1

Bit of a rant more than anything, but as someone coming from the chess world to starting to watch poker tournaments…the legal level of assistance looks unfair to me, but it also looks trivially easy to cheat. It’s madness to me:

  1. Players are often using cellphones right at the table. Some tournaments even highlight that they don’t allow phone use during a hand as if this is some kind of hyper-cautious rule that ensures fairness.
  2. Earpieces are allowed at many major tournaments, and not monitored. Some prohibit them for the final stages, but geez.
  3. Players can have teammates at events, and the teammates are allowed to use phones and laptops throughout in many tournaments, without even clear rules against getting basic advice between hands.
  4. Apparently there is limited communication between poker organizations, so you can be caught cheating in one major tournament, and still play in high stakes tournaments doing the same thing.
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  1. I just watched a video on a cheating scandal, and even in a video complaining about cheating, the presenter suggests that players caught using a solver between hands should just get a warning, not even be disqualified from the current tournament.

At this point, I can’t be mad at the cheaters. It’s like the poker community see it as an essential part of the game.