POKER EVENTS

Possible cheater caught at Full Tilt Poker.
In yet another online poker world scandal, the winner of one of the bigger monthly tournaments has been stripped of his championship title and winnings.

"BluffMagCV," an alias allegedly used by a Bluff Magazine employee named Chris Vaughn, made a rare double win by taking down the Full Tilt Poker $1 Million Guaranteed tournament and, the next weekend, the PokerStars' Sunday $1 Million Guaranteed event as well.
The first victory, however, has engendered the most discussion.

After he received an e-mail from Full Tilt, European poker pro Soren Kongsgaard, who was the runner-up in the tournament in question, stated that he had been elevated to the first-place money because BluffMagCV had passed off the play of his account to another person.
The player who took over the BluffMagCV account is allegedly Sorel "Imper1um" Mizzi, who routinely terrorizes the online tournament world and has also enjoyed great success as a live tournament player in 2007 with approximately $500,000 in winnings.

Word on 2+2 and other online forums has it that both BluffMagCV and Mizzi have both been banned from further play at Full Tilt while security staff there conduct investigations. There have also been some rumblings in the forums about the win at PokerStars, but no action has been taken with regard to that outcome.

Playing in these large-field, high-dollar tournaments is gruelling. On most occasions, a tournament can start in the afternoon East Coast time and in the early evening in Europe. Because of the size of the field, it can stretch well into the wee hours of the next day. This means players focused on a healthy win have no alternative but to remain chained to their computers for the better part of half a day.

To reduce the temptation for players to resort to tag-teaming in order to last into the late goings, online rooms could take the route of splitting these types of tournaments into two-day events. Nowhere in the live poker world are players subjected to playing in such an important tournament without the benefit of rest at some point.
Most of the time, events as important as these are scheduled as two-day tournaments at the minimum. Not only players but also the online rooms themselves would benefit from switching to such an arrangement.
That said, however, poker players are learning the hard way that the online poker rooms are now being extremely vigilant in enforcing the one-user, one-account principle. As "BluffMagCV" and Mizzi are now allegedly aware, trying to put one over on the online poker rooms has just become a lot harder. Sphere: Related Content