Nick "StoxTrader" Grudzien accused of collusion in online poker games

In my previous article I outlined some of the accusations leveled against the now former head of the online poker training site Stox Poker, Nick Grudzien. In a post on the twoplutwo poker forum Grudzien admitted to multi-accounting on both Full Tilt Poker and PokerStars, which preceded his resignation from Stox Poker.

Unfortunately for Grudzien, the story doesn’t end there, and a handful of online poker players have charged Grudzien with the “C-Word”, Collusion: A charge which Grudzien emphatically denied multiple times in the thread that now contains over 1,000 posts. At the very least, the majority 2+2’ers believe the two were soft-playing each other –which it should be pointed out is not against the T&C of Full Tilt Poker for some unknown, and is virtually an un-provable offense.

Now, collusion is by far one of the worst offenses in all of poker, and any legitimate complaint should be investigated to either prove the crime was committed, or to exonerate the accused party. In this case Nick Grudzien’s entire reputation is on the line, and accusations of collusion shouldn’t follow a player around unless they are proven, or the player flat out refuses to comply with any type of investigation.

So, while Grudzien has welcomed investigations by both Full Tilt Poker and PokerStars, the requests by his accusers, and some supporters, to have an independent third-party review his personal hand histories have thus far gone unanswered.

Another way for Grudzien to handle the alleged collusion would be to explain why his statistics are so abnormal against this one player. If he could clearly explain, in a reasonable way, why he took such unorthodox lines against this player it would go a long way in clearing his name for many poker players.

Interestingly, both 40putts and knockstiff have both been implicated as colluders in the past and investigated by the online poker sites –well before the identity of these accounts was linked to Nick Grudzien.

The main contention is Grudzien’s play against a player using the screen-name ‘Kinetica’ while playing under the name 40putts. The twoplustwo regulars have been poring through their Holdem manager databases looking for strange plays and anomalies in their play. This is basically how the online poker community discovered both the Absolute Poker and UB Poker ‘Super-User’ accounts, and so far there is enough evidence to at least warrant further investigations into the play between Kinetica and 40putts. ‘Kinetica’ is also ‘40putts’ most frequent opponent at the tables.

The ‘Kinetica’ account has been tied to an associate/friend? Of Grudzien’s named Rob Papp, although neither the association between the two, nor the screen-name belonging to Papp has been absolutely confirmed.

A few of the statistics that are being used to implicate Grudzien’s accounts and the ‘kinetica’ screen-name are the following:

From 2+2 member creedofhubris:

bulltf0rdtuff

· vs kinetica: 645 hands, 13 showdowns, 51 flops. --2.0% showdown, 7.9% flop

· vs the field (scubba, joao barbosa, ghostrideit, d_perignon): 1346 hands, 68 showdowns, 214 flops. 5.1% showdown, 15.9% flop

40putts:

· vs kinetica: 9673 hands, 158 showdowns, 659 flops: - 1.6% showdown, 6.8% flop

· vs the field (mbolt1, cometobutthead, willb77,clockwyze): 10337 hands, 1769 flops, 634 showdowns. 6.1% showdown, 17.1% flop

· vs nit (leatherass9): 2096 hands, 71 showdowns, 257 flops: - 3.4% showdown, 12.2% flop

“In these sessions, 40putts played about 32 hours, over 14 sessions, over 8 days. For about 25 of those hours, 80% of the time, he overlapped with kinetica.”

From 2+2 member Gondolin:

Showdowns for 40putts:

· 1.63% vs Kinetica

· 4.44% vs count stacula

· 5.05% vs mbolt1

· 5.47% vs l Scubba l

· 5.48% vs ComeToButthead

· 5.81% vs thetaker

· 5.83% vs gOOgly_mOOgly

· 5.92% vs willb77

· 6.20% vs kmoneyk10

· 6.30% vs bemyguestbud

· 6.38% vs nationz

· 6.62% vs gamblegambel

· 7.23% vs kylejf

· 9.83% vs clockwyze

From 2+2 member Moonshine:

“I decided that 40 and Kinetica were definitely softplaying each other. Just to confirm though, I consulted a few quick stats in HEM. I have about 40,000 hands just on 40putts, not including my hands with knockstiff. Here are some stats I found that may be of note:

Fold BB to Steal: 66.9%

3bet vs steal: 12.4%

Fold vs 4bet: 55%

I then filtered for hands that 40 played vs Kinetica (about 6800 hands) and this is what the numbers came out to

Fold BB to Steal: 71.6%

3bet vs Steal: 10.7%

Fold vs 4bet 44%

From 2+2 member sickofitall:

1) 40putts and kinetica coldcalling on the BU when one of the other is open raising 1st in from either the CO or HJ (and no other players are involved by the time action is on BU)

2) 40putts and kinetica 3 betting on the BU when one of the other is open raising 1st in from either the CO or HJ (and no other players are involved by the time action is on BU)

ad 1 coldcalling) of the ~36k hands i have from 40putts he is on the button 6,404 times (most games are 6max). from these 6,404 he is facing a raise in front of him from either the CO or the HJ 2,054 times (kinetica excluded). being in that exact spot he is cold calling the raise at a rate of 8.37% (172 times out of 2,054). now when 40putts is in that same spot but facing the raise from kinetica, his coldcalling rate increases by about 4 percentage points (12.2%) (note though that kinetica has a less than average rate for open raising from these positions [his 1st in raise from the CO is 15.8% whereas the average in my sample (without him) is 20.3%] and i will control for that in a later step).

now from the ~4.5k hands i have from kinetica he sits 822 times on the BU and 232 times he is facing a raise from either the CO or the HJ (40 putts excluded). he is coldcalling that raise at a rate of 8.2% (19 times out of 232). 62 times he is in that spot and facing the raise from 40putts. from these 62 opportunities he is 3betting 40putts only once (1.6%) (and 40putts' opening range here is close to average [18.1%]).

ad 2 3betting) this is also interesting: whereas 40putts is 3betting the field in the described spot at a rate of 5.1% (104 out of 2,054) he is not 3betting kinetica at all (remember that his coldcalling range is going up by ~4 percentage points so it seems as he is coldcalling against kinetica with that part of his range he is usually 3betting).

kinetica is 3betting the field 5.6% (13 out of 232) of the time when he is in that spot but, again, is 3betting 40putts only once in 62 opportunities (1.6%).

While the statistics themselves are not damning evidence, they do show irregularities in the two’s play and I implore anyone with hand histories involving these two players to lend your database to the 2+2 members compiling evidence.