It’s never good for poker when a major cheating scandal erupts. It makes players question the legitimacy of games and kills enthusiasm among the recreational player pool. That said, it definitely wasn’t good news when the Borgata and the New Jersey Division of Gaming Enforcement chose to cancel a $2 million guaranteed tournament over counterfeit chips.
The two parties conducted a 24-hour investigation that deemed “one or more players” had used a significant amount of counterfeit $5k chips. Given that this likely had a big impact on the results, Borgata and the NJDGE made the ethical decision to cancel a tournament with over 4,000 players and $2.4 million in prize money. Just 27 players were remaining at the time of cancellation, and the winner was set to scoop a $372,123 payout.
Following this incident, our question now is whether the cancelled Borgata tourney will have any negative effect on New Jersey’s online poker operation. Sure, the $2 million guaranteed event was in a live setting. But it was also staged by the co-owner of New Jersey’s biggest online poker room, PartyPoker Borgata.
The average experienced poker player can make the distinction between a few bad apples cheating in a land-based tournament, and what goes on in the internet world. But what about all of those potential recreational players, who might read about the fiasco and suddenly think that, whether online or live, poker is filled with cheaters.
Another thought to consider is if Sheldon Adelson will somehow use this incident to back up his perverse arguments against online gaming. Although still a reach, making the correlation between the Borgata counterfeit chips and potential online poker cheating would be about as good of anything as Adelson’s come up with so far. At least this way, he could get off the argument that internet poker leads to addiction, despite him owning the world’s most successful casino, the Venetian Macao.
NJ online poker has garnered over 150,000 accounts in just over a month’s time. And it’d sure be a shame to see this momentum ruined over a handful of stupid cheaters in the Borgata tournament. Such an incident is pretty rare, and it is virtually no reflection on what players can expect at NJ poker sites.