So I decided to play incognito this month without revealing my true identity to anyone for any reason. My experiment was designed to determine the level of cheating at the 500 level tables. For my experiment to be substantive, I needed to play at least 200 games. Also, I wanted to play with different people at different times of the day.

So after playing over 225 games on 500 level tables with an anonymous alt, I have learned a few things.

First of all, cheating is minimal at best on 500 tables. If you want to listen to the mis-direction of some of the admitted and/or busted cheaters on this site, they would have you believe that most of the cheating goes on at the 500, 100 and 0 tables. Not true.

Well, from my observations, I saw more accusations of cheating than actual cheating in the past month. In all of my 500 level games, I was the victim of 2 blatant PGAs. Thats it, 2! I witnessed 3 other PGAs that others fell victim too. 3, thats it. So less that 4% of all 500 level games that I participated in, did I see blatant PGA bullshit.

Warning! While most of the following information in this thread is not new to experienced players, and some people (like Sam) have written in past forum posts about the same behaviors, I want to share my results with the community anyway.

The most interesting things that I witnessed included game dynamics as related to player psychology. Some of these

Observation 1: RED MEAT. Most payers with low point totals, who make dumb moves, usually fall victim to experienced players on the board.

Observation 2: LITTLE FISH SYNDROME. Some players with low point totals become afraid of people with high point totals and avoid hitting the higher ranking player. An experienced and higher ranking player will pick up on this and use it to his/her advantage.

Observation 3: UNREQUITED PGA. Some players develop an admiration for another player and decide not to attack him/her. In the case where the admired player does not have the same feelings towards his/her admirer, the admirer gets taken advantage of and gets attacked quickly. Many times, these scenarios can be spotted when two people start arguing and play to the death.

Observation 4: VOHAL POSSUM. Some players fall victim to others playing -dead-. So when an experienced player has a crappy start, he/she will pretend to be -away- causing three strategic things to happen. 1) The possum player gets stronger by stacking. 2) Victim players may think it is ok to proceed with a weak connect since they believe that the possum has left the game. 3) The possum player can see which neighbors are threatening by observing the path that each neighbor decides to venture on. This technique is often used when the possum needs to connect a large and distant stack through a mess of large neighboring stacks.

Observation 5: CHAT CHALLENGED CHINAMAN. So when a player who does not understand English well and subsequently does not use the chat box, bad things happen. If you dont communicate and you happen to be in the lead, revolt is eminent. These players will use whatever little English they know to sputter out a few expletives and PGA accusations before they die.

Observation 6: BLUE BALL BANGFEST. On occasion, there will appear a player who has a lot of aggression to take out and decides to wreck everyone in their path. They decide to use weak threats that end up working against them most of the time.

Observation 7: BADASS BUILDING BUDDIES. On occasion, when a seemingly fair and balance game is being played where maybe 6 players are battling (3 battles of 2 v 2), a subtle strategic maneuver will surface. Usually two experienced players who are battling and getting nowhere decide to back off from one another. They both sit and build for a while. In the mean time, the other players continue to happily destroy one another. During the time in which the buddies are sitting, they mutually realize that it is in their best interest to sit and wait for some of the dust to settle. Then they emerge and kill the other four players. These two end up going 1-2 at the end. So their observation leads to a silent truce that pays off. Then the fun accusations of PGA start flying.

So I hope some of this stuff is insightful to newer players. And nobody has to believe for a second that most of the cheating goes on at the 500 tables. It is simply not true. While some cheating goes on everywhere, the highest concentration of cheating occurs at the highest levels of this game. Case in point... Why has the Boner Oiler account been play banned again?