Originally Posted by
ArunSh
Ok, you wanted to discus this so I will. In my opinion, Donk should not be allowed to say things like "call call call", "raise raise raise", or anything like that during a hand. While I understand he means it in a joking way, and it's not something which is likely to affect things, it does have the POTENTIAL to affect the action which is not appropriate. Despite my disliking of Waves, if I had the option to do something like that myself, knowing it would be a positive outcome, I still would not because it crosses an ethical boundary which I would not want to cross.
If I were in charge of this facet of SBR, I would warn Donk not to say anything that could potentially affect the action during a hand or his chat privileges would be taken away, pretty simple. That said, those of you are who screaming about all observer chat being disallowed are being ridiculous imo. Part of poker here is the social aspect, chatting it up with people, talking about sports games going on, life in general, who knows. And sometimes the person you want to chat with is not at your table or one of you isn't even playing in the tourney (perhaps got knocked out). You want to disallow that kind of chat - that's ridiculous. There is 0 reason it should be disallowed if it doesn't affect the poker action, and if it bothers anyone like no1here, well as others have suggested, turn the chat off.
That said, some silly statement like "call call call" while perhaps not totally appropriate are not something to go nuts over - a gentle warning not to do it again is all that imo is needed. This should not be indirectly compared to someone knowingly dumping chips to another player, thereby without question affecting the tournament greatly, possibly resulting in a player getting a World Cup spot they didn't honestly earn in front of someone who played fairly (and who knows if this happened on other occasions as well - I wonder how many times these two might have done this in the past more surreptitiously so that no one noticed). Since many have said that Waves was involved in a chip dumping scheme in a cash game as well, if that's true, he clearly probably would not have had qualms about doing it for years in the tournaments as well - who knows if any of his prior World Cup qualifications or any high finish could have been helped along by this type of dumping?
So while you might raise a reasonable point, bringing up something so minor compared to the real fraud that seems to have occurred here seems a tad silly frankly. When someone gets arrested for a bank robbery are they going to say to the arresting officer "Well you stole a candy bar from your friend when you were 8 years old so we should prosecute you for that if you are going to prosecute me for this bank robbery". Let's keep the crimes involved here in proper perspective!