How cheaters wiped out my bankroll

I love to play Texas Hold 'Em. I use to play it every night on Xbox Live. It's important that you know that especially when I say I could care less if I ever played it again . . . almost. And it's all because of the cheaters.

It seems there's a glitch in the game that allows players to accumulate large amounts of money for their Competitive bank rolls. It has something to do with giggling your internet cable or pushing your standby button on your modem. Whatever it is you have to do you lose connection with the game (or I should say everyone else at the table loses connection with you) so the system thinks they all dropped out which makes you the winner of $2,000 chips (for the free tournament) without playing a hand. Since it only takes a couple of minutes to get a full table and just a couple of seconds to giggle your cable you can rake in a lot of dough in a very short amount of time.

If you ever looked at the leaderboards for the game you'll see a lot of people with large amounts of money with a small amount of hands played. They're either very lucky or very sneaky. Not everyone on the leaderboards are cheaters but it makes it very hard for legitimate players to get there.

So what does Microsoft or Tik Games decide to do about it? They decide to come out with an update for the game that will reset the leaderboards, stop the glitch to prevent cheaters and reset everyone's Competitive bankroll back to the default. Finally someone being proactive about cleaning up a game run by cheaters. It just would have been nice if they would have informed everyone about it before they implemented it.

I've been slowly working towards an achievement in the game to get one of your bankrolls up to $100,000. Since I didn't like battling on player tables where people can just keep buying more chips and I can't bluff the AI in a single player game I figured my best bet would be to work with my Competitive bankroll. I was getting up there too. I had $83,200 before I logged in to play. I got the usual "there is a new update for this game" window and didn't think anything about it.

That was until I tried to find a Competitive Tournament to join and noticed my bankroll. $2,000? WTF? My single player and player match bankrolls were the same but what happened to my Competitive bankroll? I went on line to bitch and moan about this on Xbox's forums when I saw a thread talking about the update. I read it and then I knew what happened.

Now I'm all for resetting the leaderboards and eliminating cheating but why couldn't they have told us about the update before hand? I would have played a few more games the night before to get that $100,000 achievement instead of going to bed. Now all that hard work it gone and for what? Nothing.

Cleaning out the leaderboards and bankrolls of cheaters is a good thing but why does honest players such as myself have to suffer as well? I don't know how you could legitimately tell who was cheating and who wasn't so you could subjectively reset their bankrolls but I have 2,500+ hands and my highest bankroll is (was) only $83,200. I don't think I look like a cheater. Now if this solved the problem so no one could cheat again then fine, I accept this set back for the good of the game. But it didn't.

Within 24 hours of the reset there was already someone in the top spot on the leaderboards with over $104 million dollars. Now I know once you get to the higher buy in tables you can really win a lot of chips but that amount seems a little unrealistic in such a short time. No matter how mad I am at the game I still like playing so I tried my hand at a couple of games and guess what? People were still glitching. Giggling their cables, pressing standby or whatever before the first cards are dealt. In two seconds they win and move on to their next cheat. Things are just as they always were. And things will probably be reset again later. So why bother playing if my bankroll is going to keep getting wiped out?

There will always be cheaters. That's just a fact of playing games, whether that's online or sitting at home with friends. I accept that. I also accept the fact that I will never see my gamer ID on the leaderboards. The only way that will happen is if no one else is playing the game and I played it enough to knock everyone else off the leaderboard who's already on it. And that's no going to happen. I just wish my bankroll hadn't been wiped out because of cheaters.