PokerStars updates tournament rules - one account per player

[Lee Jones]

Hi folks –
After reviewing your questions and concerns, and after further deliberation, we felt it was important to improve our rules on in one aspect. That is the question of a single player playing multiple userids during a tournament.

Here is what we are adding to our tournament rules:

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With trivial exceptions, a player may play on only one account during a tournament. Violation of this rule may result in penalties ranging from a warning, to disqualification from the tournament (with partial or full forfeiture of winnings), to barring from PokerStars.

Examples:
1. You get a phone call during a PokerStars tournament. You ask your husband, who has already busted out of that tournament, to play your hands for you. You are on the phone for ten minutes and then resume play. This is acceptable.

2. You and a friend, who is a tournament pro, are playing in the same tournament. You agree that if he busts out before you do, he will take over playing your account. This is prohibited.

3. Your husband is out of town for the weekend, but gives you his password. You log into both his account and yours and play both accounts in the same tournament. This is prohibited.
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We realize that we can’t catch every situation like this. And we will have to have a high degree of certainty before we disqualify a player. But as I said in my original post, we are absolutely serious about protecting the integrity of our games. If we find people blatantly violating these rules, we will take action, up to (and including) barring players from the site.

One thing: we are not going to impose sanctions retroactively. We didn’t have a clear rule beforehand, so it wouldn’t be fair to punish people when they didn’t break the existing rules. But now we’ve published the rule on a number of major poker forums, and it can be found at:

http://www.pokerstars.com/tournamentsrules.html

Thank you all for your comments, suggestions, and support.

Best regards,
Lee Jones

PokerStars Poker Room Manager