Multi-accounting is Cheating - Plain and Simple

It seems every time I browse to a poker forum I see another post about some big name player who has been caught multi-accounting. Just to be clear, multi-accounting is when a single player plays more than one account in the same tournament. One thing I've noticed however is that there is a huge lack of information in these threads as to why this is cheating. I see a lot of posts stating that it really doesn't matter because the person is paying multiple entry fees and it's really no different than two or more players of equal skill entering the tournament. Well, that may be true but it's not that simple. The top online tournament players are successful not because they consistently cash more times than the rest of us, but because they cash deeper than the rest of us at a higher frequency. That may sound like the same thing, but for one subtle difference. The only way to make any money in a tournament is to make the final table and the only way to make a lot of money is to finish in the top 3. Anything less and you only make a few buyins. Variance in MTTs is very high. If you only play to cash, you'll be a losing player because you can't sneak into the money enough times to make up for all the times you bust without making a dime. The goal of successful tournament players is not to stay alive until they make the money but to amass enough chips to be able to make a deep run. This is why you see them bust out so early a lot of times. Volume is the key to their success. If they enter a tournament and bust out in the first few levels, they just fire up another tournament. Their skill isn't their ability to make it into the money but their ability to accumulate chips and manage those chips. Give these guys a big stack and they will take it far past the first few payout levels. So, back to the multi-accounting. Entering a tournament more than once allows a player to increase their volume without having to find more tournaments to enter. If there are 100 tournaments available in a single week across all sites and a player enters each of them 5 times then that is the same as playing 500 tournaments in that single week. This will increase the number of deep runs, which in turn increases the amount of profit they make. In other words, it allows them to do in a week what would normally take them a month. What doesn't change very much is the total money available in those 100 tournaments. So, if they are getting more of that money due to their increased volume, it means everyone else as a whole is getting less. They are, in effect, stealing from the tournament-playing community. This is why multi-accounting is cheating and is also why you should care.

Another thing that should be of concern to everyone is that it is possible that they could run two or more of their accounts to the last few tables. This is where they would gain an even greater advantage than simply their increased equity in the tournament. At this point, it is likely that they will have more than one account at the same table. Here they could greatly affect the play at those tables. For instance, they could raise with any two cards from early position and re-reraise from middle position. This would force the players in late position to actually have a hand. They could make other plays as well, but the bottom line is that their accounts would pick up more blinds and steal more raises than they normally would get and be doing it at a time when the chips are much more important. Their chances of running their accounts all the way to the top would greatly increase, leaving even less money for everyone else.