What Does The partypoker Game Integrity Team Do To Keep You Safe?

The feedback and conversations driven by my recent blog relating to a potential global poker blacklist have been overwhelmingly positive, and I am grateful for the important conversation it started among the poker community. The game integrity team wants to reiterate what steps partypoker takes to protect you, the players, and to ensure partypoker is a safe and fun place to play.

First, our dedicated Game Integrity team has a solid foundation of former professional poker players who are passionate about protecting the game they love. Those former professional players make up the team that handles all game integrity matters including bot detection, incidents of collusion, chip dumping, multi-accounting, account sharing, ghosting, buttoning, ratholing, and more.

The team monitors every source of public information you can think of, from forum posts and social media to accessing the dark web. Combining this with our capabilities to review gameplay, analyse players’ technical data and partypoker’s vast investment in this area, we are able to keep up-to-date with the latest tricks employed by unscrupulous players with the desire to cheat at the game we love. For the avoidance of any doubt, we do not have the ability, nor would we want the ability, to see our players’ screens in any capacity. Personally, I would consider such a feature a huge invasion of privacy.

Above all, we operate with complete transparency and hold ourselves publicly accountable by reporting the facts and figures about our operation; you may recall several blog posts details the bots we shut down and the money that was redistributed.

Real Name Games

partypoker is at the forefront of providing online poker games where players display their real names. We were the first online poker operator in the world to release real name tables back in July 2019. I am looking forward to our first major online tournament series of the year, the MILLIONS Online KO Edition, that runs from May 5 through May 31, which is played with real names only.

The main reason for real name games is to reduce concerns related to the anonymity of online poker. When players use their real names, it increases transparency in addition to those players who generally only play live poker becoming more open to playing online with actual names on display.

We would like every partypoker tournament to use real names, but player feedback suggests there is still a high demand for aliases , particularly from players who frequent our daily tournament schedule. Indeed, we will continue to run regular polls regarding real names to ensure we provide the tournaments that our players want.

Should we determine that a third party is playing on an account that does not belong to them and is therefore in breach of our terms and conditions, we reserve the right to close the account in question and withhold any winnings and/or the account’s balance. partypoker does not financially benefit from any confiscation of funds because they are always redistributed back to the affected players at the earliest convenience.

Furthermore, we never close an account without a thorough investigation that proves a breach of our terms and conditions occurred. Unfortunately, for legal reasons, we cannot currently release information to other players about the specific reasons behind any bans, but rest assured we are proactive in our approach to preventing and stopping any terms and conditions breaches.

Come Talk to the Game Integrity Team

The Game Integrity team is open, honest, and as transparent as it can possibly be. The team will be on the ground at the partypoker Players Championship (PPC) UK in Nottingham, and at MILLIONS Europe in Barcelona. Head to the pop-up area at these events if you want to talk to us about any concerns you may have.

Alternatively, you can reach out to us via email at gameintegrity@partypoker.com and arrange a meeting with us.

We encourage every partypoker player to contact the team with any concerns, no matter how slight those concerns initially seem. The team fully investigates every single report it receives and always treats those reports with 100% confidentiality. We also promise to reply to you with whether or not action was taken based on the information you provided.

You can contact us via email at gameintegrity@partypoker.com or by visiting our Safer Poker webpage.

Juha Pasanen

Head of Game Integrity – partypoker network