Rob Yong, the owner of the United Kingdom’s Dusk Till Dawn casino has recently announced a new ambitious initiative that seeks to eradicate cheating in poker. Referred to as the FairPlay Initiative, the association is set to consist of PartyPoker and Dusk Till Dawn casino as the founding members.
The inclusion of PartyPoker does not come as much of a surprise especially because Yong has been known to be heavily involved with the online poker operator. He has not only hosted a number of the online poker operator’s live events at the DTD in the past but has also been part of the PartyPoker LIVE tour that is headed by John Duthie. In fact, Rob Yong was the spokesperson of the recent changes at PartyPoker that were intended to make gaming fairer for customers by eliminating cheating – these changes, as it turns out, were launched under the FairPlay moniker.
“I founded FairPlay to encourage online poker sites, live poker tours, and casino card rooms to collaborate by sharing information on customers that they have caught cheating. For example, using bots, collusion, multi-accounting, or ghosting,” Yong commented.
Some of the sweeping changes that were implemented at PartyPoker to that effect included the prohibition of the use of Heads-Up Displays (HUDs), the removal of downloadable hand histories, banning of most third-party software as well as forcing all players to change their aliases in a bid to render any of the databases kept by cheating players obsolete.
With FairPlay now in the picture, the members online poker operators will be able to access a blacklist of banned players. This list will be updated on a daily basis by both live casinos or online gambling sites.
The Setbacks
Needless to say, the FairPlay Association is a very promising approach in as far as preventing cheating is concerned. However, some of the measures it is taking to achieve its goals were bound to raise some eyebrows. The biggest stumbling block will, therefore, be the recently implemented General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) that took effect on May 25, 2018. The GDPR essentially protects the data and privacy of all individual citizens in the European Union.
The penalties for breaching or going against the terms of the GDPR can be very severe with fines of up to €10 million or even up to 2 percent of the annual worldwide turnover of the company. Even so, it seems that Rob Yong is very determined to get the FairPlay Initiative off the ground. He believes that anyone who is caught breaking the Terms of Service or Terms of Contract of a gaming site may not be necessarily be protected by the GDPR. Still, it goes without saying that this idea might be a long shot since similar initiatives from before have failed since the GDPR makes it impossible for the members o share any meaningful information
