Published on August 21st, 2007 10:49 pm EST
I was reading Brian "sbrugby" Townsend's blog the other day and a passage jumped out at me. Townsend is currently in the process of rebuilding his confidence after a big downswing, and announced that he has dropped down and is playing under "secret names" on different sites.
This isn't the first time that I have heard of this taking place recently. Another well-known online poker pro has a blog, and he too outlined how he would be playing under different accounts, as he was hoping that he would "run better."
Townsend has done this before as well, briefly appearing on Full Tilt Poker as "Moneyhungryhoe", and then returned to his familiar alias of "sbrugby." David Benyamine famously had about a dozen different accounts on Full Tilt Poker until he finally signed on as a Full Tilt Pro and stuck with just "David Benyamine."
My problem with this is that there is a complete double standard when it comes to having more than one account. If you are sloshing around in the $0.50/$1 No Limit Hold'em games and start to run bad and open up a second account, it will likely be closed almost immediately. If you are a well-known name in poker, it seems as though the poker rooms will look the other way. Well, I can't speak for every poker room, but Full Tilt Poker publicly said that they were allowing Benyamine to play on multiple accounts back when he had all those different accounts.
Poker rooms have these rules for a reason. It's unfair for a player to start a second account in order to maintain some anonymity, as his opponents won't know who they are playing against. This should be the case for everyone, no matter how high profile they are. These poker rooms should have zero tolerance for multiple accounts.
I mean, presumably Townsend is playing right now on sites such as Full Tilt Poker and Pokerstars under a different account than "sbrugby" and "aba20." There are only so many sites that he could be playing on, so we have to assume that these are two of them. If you were cleaned up by a guy that you had never heard of in a heads-up session and later found out that it was Brian Townsend, how would you feel? What if you had a ton of notes on Townsend but no notes on this "new" player?
In our opinion, the online poker rooms need to enforce this rule across the board. That is the only fair solution. It shouldn't matter how much attention and rake you bring in to the sites. A rule is a rule.
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Filed Under: Online Poker Rooms
| Miscellaneous King Articles
I was reading Brian "sbrugby" Townsend's blog the other day and a passage jumped out at me. Townsend is currently in the process of rebuilding his confidence after a big downswing, and announced that he has dropped down and is playing under "secret names" on different sites. This isn't the first time that I have heard of this taking place recently. Another well-known online poker pro has a blog, and he too outlined how he would be playing under different accounts, as he was hoping that he would "run better."
Townsend has done this before as well, briefly appearing on Full Tilt Poker as "Moneyhungryhoe", and then returned to his familiar alias of "sbrugby." David Benyamine famously had about a dozen different accounts on Full Tilt Poker until he finally signed on as a Full Tilt Pro and stuck with just "David Benyamine."
My problem with this is that there is a complete double standard when it comes to having more than one account. If you are sloshing around in the $0.50/$1 No Limit Hold'em games and start to run bad and open up a second account, it will likely be closed almost immediately. If you are a well-known name in poker, it seems as though the poker rooms will look the other way. Well, I can't speak for every poker room, but Full Tilt Poker publicly said that they were allowing Benyamine to play on multiple accounts back when he had all those different accounts.
Poker rooms have these rules for a reason. It's unfair for a player to start a second account in order to maintain some anonymity, as his opponents won't know who they are playing against. This should be the case for everyone, no matter how high profile they are. These poker rooms should have zero tolerance for multiple accounts.
I mean, presumably Townsend is playing right now on sites such as Full Tilt Poker and Pokerstars under a different account than "sbrugby" and "aba20." There are only so many sites that he could be playing on, so we have to assume that these are two of them. If you were cleaned up by a guy that you had never heard of in a heads-up session and later found out that it was Brian Townsend, how would you feel? What if you had a ton of notes on Townsend but no notes on this "new" player?
In our opinion, the online poker rooms need to enforce this rule across the board. That is the only fair solution. It shouldn't matter how much attention and rake you bring in to the sites. A rule is a rule.
--
Filed Under: Online Poker Rooms
| Miscellaneous King Articles
