Competing in the World Championship of Online Poker is a prestigious honor and a privilege extended by the PokerStars.com website.  In the case of the recent tournament however, the winner was unfortunately disqualified after some investigation conducted by the online poker room and casino into the activities of the account holder.  While details are extremely vague and sketchy, it would appear that the winner of the tournament was actually a player whose account was eliminated earlier in the tournament.  The use of these types of dummy accounts to allow a high-level professional poker tournament player to compete multiple times in the same tournament is relatively common and has been pointed out on several occasions and other tournaments in the past.  While the concept of detecting this type of cheating and account swapping is extremely difficult, in this case it appears that the administration at the Poker Stars website has accurately detected players involved in actively cheating at the world Championship of Online Poker Main Event on the Poker Stars website.

Actions taken were simple and swift, as the Poker Stars website simply adjusted all of the winning places one spot forward, so that the second-place winner became the first place winner and so forth on down the line.  In this way, everyone received a fair chance at winning from the competition itself despite the cheating that occurred by the top level player.  Generally, when this type of activity is detected, the details given on the methods in which the online poker rooms and casinos caught the cheater are vague due to the fact that the poker room establishment does not want to give away the methods which it utilizes to detect this type of cheating.  If any information is released at all, it usually pertains to the player, the method of cheating that was accomplished and the punishment that was taken with very little more information given other than what is necessary to reassure players that no cheating can occur undetected at these types of online poker room and casinos and the poker tournaments that they host.

Fortunately, in this case, the cheating was detected quickly and the entire situation was swiftly defused.  In the future, there will likely be more and more effort made to detect this type of unscrupulous activity that is often committed by online poker room and casino players.