Multi Accounting

1. Playing in a poker tournament using more than one screen name.

Famous Multi Accounters

Online poker has been full of infamous multi-accounters, including JJProdigy, Imper1um, atimos, and ZeeJustin.

Yes, It is Cheating

Some people argue that multi accounting is not cheating because the player doing it still forks over a buy-in for each account. Plus, in a very large tournament the extra benefit from each additional account is supposedly minimal. We're sorry to inform those people that multi accounting is most definitely cheating. It both gives the cheater an opportunity to keep playing if one of his accounts busts, it gives the cheater an opportunity to collude with himself, and it allows the cheater to hide his identity by playing under screen names unfamiliar to his opponents.

February 2006 - Multi Accounting Month

On February 12, 2006, a player with the screen name "ABlackCar" won the Party Poker $500,000 guaranteed tournament. Before the event was over, word got out that it was renowned online phenom, Josh "JJProdigy" Fields. The thing was, JJProdigy had already been eliminated. After a brief investigation, Party Poker banned Fields and all of his accounts and confiscated the $180,000 he had on the site. PokerStars also performed an investigation, found Fields guilty of the same sort of thing, and banned him.

That same month, another top online player, Justin "ZeeJustin" Bonomo was found to have used as many as six different accounts in a single tournament on PokerStars. Of course, his funds were confiscated and he was banned.

Both players issued public apologies, but they were not received well by the poker community. Bonomo even tried to justify his cheating by saying that he never did it in tournaments of fewer than 1,000 players and that he opened up more games in order to negate his advantage by hurting his ability to concentrate.

Related Terms

Tournament