People cheating with chat

I was playing a tourney at Blue square the other day, and one guy on the table piped up OMG I don't believe it two people at this table are chatting to each other on msn. He went on to name the people, but surely he must have had some kind of dishonest software running to have this information himself.
I have only been playing a few months myself, but surely the sites could track this or have software that disables chat software if your logged on to a game.
Do you think this is a big problem or am I showing my naivete a little bit. It does make me wonder if this goes on at low stakes tourneys that there must be a lot of people raking it in at bigger ones through cheating.

The real question is how much does it matter?

if people are going to cheat they shouldnt even play the game.

WV you are right because they cant control the cards that come up or anything.

surely it gives a big advantage to know what the other guys definately don't have though

report it to the site and give them the Game Number and what time it occured, they will ban there chat,, ive done it at Bodog and it works, both were banned from chatting,, buck

It could give a small advantage if you know I folded a K and you have KQ (1 of your outs is gone) but the advantage is VERY small because most of the time my cards would be irrelevant to your hand. I mean it's cheating but it's a huge risk (having all your money taken) for very little reward (knowing an out was folded). The biggest thing that could happen is if they used each other to build huge pots but this would really be more of a cash game problem because in a tourney 1 of them would quickly go busto.

Already did that at the time buckster, I was meaning why not disable all msn, yahoo when you log on to game, at least make the cheats use there free mobile minutes. lol

1. This guy most likely had no idea if they were using a chat program, maybe they were but he had no proof.

2. People do do this

3. Doing this can gain you a small edge, but not any huge edge. You only know about an extra 1-2 outs.

4. IM conversations are allowed. I talk all the time to people at the same table as I am. That said, unless we've both folded or the hand is over we don't talk about hole cards.

5. Most people doing this probably lose more money because they'll give too much weight to it. They'll call with second pair and because the other guy he was talking to on IM said they folded a top pair matching card assume the other guy doesn't have top pair and call all the bets. Only to find out that either he did have one of the other 2 of top pair or a set or something.

6. No idea why I'm doing this in number format, I'm gonna stop now.

it has to be crappy players that do that because if a player is good then they dont need to cheat so the crappy players just have one less player at the table to take them out.

Most collusion is passive. ie avoid each others big hands.

Aggressive is pot building when 1 has the nuts or very good hand, pricing others in.

Yep, and passive collusion doesn't hurt anyone but pokerstars (rake), while active collusion is easy to catch. When 2 people sit together a lot, and several hands when one has a good hand and the other doesn't they both build the pot, it's pretty obvious collusion is going on.

Me and Curtis talk on aim all the time while we are playing. Sometimes we are sitting at the same tournament/cash table. However, not once have we ever given advice to one another, and we never will. We just talk to talk, not to cheat.

My point in saying that is just because people are talking on I.M., it does not mean they are cheating