Cheating at the USPC?
Disclaimer: This entire story is comprised solely of 2nd and 3rd hand information and deductions on my part. Take it FWIW.
My buddy from work came in my office with lots of entertaining stories from his weekend in AC. I won't bore you with all of them, but this one struck me as, at least, curious.
He was playing 1/2 NL at the Taj Friday night and the $1000 NL USPC event was going on behind him. At some point during the night he noticed Men Nguyen playing at the table closest to him, but on the other side of a glass wall.
About 1 AM Men, who has been drinking pretty heavily during the whole event, gets irate and is standing, pointing, and yelling at two of the players at his table.
The next morning my buddy is back at the Taj playing 2/5 NL and the dealer is talking about how the guys that finished 1-2 in the tournament last night were brothers and that they had finished 2-1 in an earlier event (Note: the dealer also stated that these (unspecified) players had also been banned from Foxwoods). From what my buddy had seen the night before he interpreted this as Men accusing two players of cheating.
After he told me the story this morning I checked the tournament results and it turns out that Men and Ut Nguyen (both of Bell Gardens, Ca.) finished 1-2 in this tournament and 2-1 in the 9/25 ($300) tournament.
Now, in no way do I beleive that Men the Master needs to cheat to win a tourney, especially a $300 or $1000 tourney, nor do I know if they were the accused parties and wether they were accused of soft-playing each other or outright signaling/collusion. But, having never played in a live tourney, how big of a concern is this? Obviously, they both had to play pretty damn good on their own to even make it to 2 final tables, but once they got there how much is implicit or outright collusion likely?
|