[TheRempel]

This is the main body of the email I recieved from Stars support:

"The first thing that I look for in such cases is a relationship between the two players. In this instance, they all live in Sweden . They have also logged in from a common computer or internet connection. I believe these players do know each other.

I then look for frequency of play together. I am looking to see if these players seem to be seeking each other out. Although a high frequency of play is not necessarily an indictment, it can be a harbinger of unethical play. In this case, the players have only played one tournament together,and that was a heads up tournament between "tiltjezz" and "thenizz". "thenizz" and "tiltjezz" have played 799 hands together, out of a combined total of over 16,000 in the last two months. In fact, many players have similar totals, as you have played 492 hands against "thenizz" during the same time period. "thenizz" and "TILTkason" have played 562
hands out of over 9,000, and finally, "TILTkason" and "tiltjezz" have
played 722 out of over 16,000 hands.

With that said, the strongest evidence will be revealed from an in
depth, "hand by hand" analysis of their play together. One of the
advantages of online poker is that there is a full record of every hand, and after the fact, we can look through the hands with all cards face up; as a result, cheaters cannot hide what they are doing.

While investigating for ring game collusion, I look specifically for:

1) Pot building-The players put in small bets to intice others to call, and one bets or raises with a weak hand when his partner is holding a strong hand.

2)Squeeze play(Whipsawing)-Both players exercise unwarranted aggression, in an effort to drive other players out of the pot.

3)Chip dumping-The player with the larger stack purposely loses, or "dumps" to the smaller stack to ensure both players remain in the game. This help indicate that the players might be using a shared bankroll.

4)Best hand play-The players will not play hands that duplicate or
counterfeit one another before the flop, and/or after the flop only the better hand will continue any further. This can only be done sucessfully by sharing hole cards, and can be difficult to spot even for the most experienced professionals. To look for this form of collusion, we often must look for examples that don't fit the criteria. For instance when the better hand folds on the flop, whilst the weaker hand continues. This is usually is a good indicator that the players are not employing a best hand strategy.

After reviewing many hands between these players, particularly focusing on the sessions you were involved in; I found no evidence of the above techniques being used. They play hard against each other and on several occasions, and in a number of perfect pot-building scenarios, the weaker hand was actually folded rather than raising or betting. I saw a number of hands where they played similar or even dominated hands against each other.

In many instances they played aggressively against each other, whether heads up or with others involved.

There were also times that the players seemed to "slow down" when heads up. These situations seemed to coincide with the players both holding mediocre hands. In situations when the players were heads up and held strong hands, or even weak hands, they played aggressivily or folded. This supports the
opinion that these players know each other, as a degree of soft playing is common when "friends" play heads up in a ring game. If this was occurring during a tournament, this would be illegal and I would take action. In a ring game, there is nothing wrong with checking down a pot since other players no longer have an interest in it. We really must focus on whether the players use their relationship as an unfair advantage to the other players, and when looking at the cards face up these instances become very obvious. I honestly saw nothing to indicate that they are involved in
unethical play, and there were many times their play resulted in damage to their collective stack, which would also be inconsistent with a collusive effort.

Given the evidence that is available, I can only conclude that these
players are not working together in the games at this point. However, I have placed a note in each of the players’ accounts so that we may continue to monitor their play in the future."

So yeah, I am not horribly worried about their colluding but they have a tendency to play together on multiple tables and I have noticed situations where it seems as though they are either softplaying each other purposely or are in some sort of communication regarding their holecards.