The majority of the people who play here define what this site is like. You like the competitiveness of poker balanced with the socialness of sitting around the table with friends. I work hard to provide a balance between a competitive environment with stats and a social environment with friends.

However sometimes, no matter how much code I put into the site to make a good social/competitive platform, there is still the possibility that the balance can be tipped. I usually don't manually try to enforce things. In fact I never have. But when nearly half of the top 25 players have pooled their chips on the final day the competitiveness of this site is lost. I think this is a problem that has been slowly growing simply because nothing has been done about it until now.

I have bumped accounts back significantly that pooled chips on the last day. It was hard for me to do this because I know it was affecting people that I really do like a lot. But I think it's essential to send a message that this pooling of chips is not cool. This site is about playing poker - not a popularity contest won by pooling chips.

I'll handle a couple of responses I've seen:

Q: How is this cheating?

A: Technically it's not cheating. But it makes the game not about poker but about making friends. Making friends is great and the friendliness on this site is an amazing thing and something I want to help as much as possible - but the game needs to remain as poker.

Q: This doesn't hurt anyone.

A: The top 1% players act as role models to thousands of other players. If they get medals by pooling chips then that is seen as the way to play. The majority of the people here love poker and when the game becomes a chip pooling game the satisfaction of playing is lost - all this for just a few people at the top with medals!

Q: I'm innocent, I just transferred these chips from my own accounts.

A: Ok, so you're not abusing the social aspect of this game, ignoring that the game is poker. But it still creates an inaccurate leader board which affects most of the players on the site negatively. If you need to transfer, do it gradually over the month (I do plan to eventually have you validate/change emails on older accounts with invalid emails).

I hope the people affected do not take this personally (I really do like you!).