This is the most annoying thing and I myself have suffered greatly from it and am still looking for an answer to the problem.
I have found that is “most” occasions that contacting the webmaster and asking them not to display your passwords or to delete threads containing your password works.
Tips to password protection
*Give out the passwords only a couple of hours before the tournaments, this helps a bit.
*With some poker sites you can give them a list of player names 24hours before the event and they can manually add them to the tournament. This eliminates the need for a password alltogether.
* Make sure that if someone googles the tournament name, that a page from your site comes up top. Make it clear on that page how a player would be eligible to obtain that password and when it will be distributed. They will then not google any further for it.
*Some poker sites can arrange a tournament so only players tracked to you cann enter, this also eliminates the need for a password.
* Make your password unique – I once ran a tournament, logged in to distribute the password and found that 300 people had already entered. Someone had guessed the password correctly and posted it on a forum a few days before the start.
Sometimes my members report to me of people spreading the password, I have made a few posts in the forum regarding and it can be a good way of weeding out the spammers. Sometimes I find the sites myself through googling a couple of weeks later. Most of the time its foreign language sites, I have not come across a major site in English that does this, thankfully.
I have come accross a couple of forums where people have been spamming my passwords and the webmasters have worked with me and warned them of this, these forums continue however to allow people to post passwords belonging to other sites. I guess they thrive on the traffic as people visit specifically for that reason. These sites have fully cooperated with me so I will not name them.
One I will name and shame however:
I joined this forum xhttp://www.monpoker.com recently to cotact the webmaster to ask them to stop and they ip banned me from the forum. Luckily The person who was spamming used the same name on both forums, so it was easy for me to ban him in return. I think he was a moderator.
Many of the small sites and boards I do not bother with as I know it will not have any impact on my site or take away my sign ups. I also expect maybe 50% of players to tell one other person the password through IM or face to face, but I am also ok with this.
I have found the poker sites themselves to be generally unhelpful with the problem, at the end of the day, they are getting sign ups, they don’t care where they have come from.