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Casino Poker Cheats
Online poker cheating differs in several key ways from casino poker cheating. There are four principal areas of concern:
Minor cheating -- with friends telling each other hole cards on the phone or IM, but who do not share a bankroll or play together
Idiot cheating -- now less common than in the past when more cardrooms did not fold hands when players timed out
Inept collusion -- where stupid partners collude together in ways so obvious that they are discovered quickly
Expert collusion -- where competent people collude in an effective way, including "self-collusion"
where one person plays in the same game on two different accounts
I should also briefly address phantom cheating or loser hysteria. A funny phenomenon I have observed when
it comes to online poker is how some inexperienced player will post a message on
RGP or another poker message board, saying something
like: "When playing at a casino, the other players told me it was stupid to play online because they made a lot of
money cheating with their friends while talking on the phone."
This reminds me of a scene from Say Anything where John Cusack (memorable as "Lloyd Dobler")
is talking about women to some guy friends. After listening to their "wisdom", he says:
"If you guys are such experts on women, then why are you hanging out here behind the Quickie Mart without
girlfriends on a Friday night"?
<long pause, then one replies>
"By choice! Yeah man, by choice."
If there was a gold mine in doing what these people claimed, why were they doing something else, and telling someone
else the "secret" of their gold mine.
But at least this sort of cheating does exist to some degree. Other hysterical newsgroup postings have ranted about all
manner of obscure ways that cardrooms cheat players. The allegations offer techniques that cardrooms would have to be
insane to use as they would be extremely counterproductive. One of the most common of these is the "action flops"
fantasy. This allegation betrays a total lack of understanding how casinos make money. Cardrooms generally hate big pots.
They like small pots. Two players playing
for one bet each in a 5/10 game normally max out the rake. Any action beyond that occurs without the cardroom making
anything. Creating "action flops" would be directly against a cardroom's interests.
But delusional paranoia, where time and again bad poker players show why they are bad poker players, is a subject for other
articles on this site. Bad, cheating cardrooms have existed, like they exist in any industry, but for the most part, that is
not a "cheating" thing people should concern themselves with. Play at the successful cardrooms and you should have
no worries.
Like b&m casinos, the online cardrooms hate cheaters, because they are trying to take money from them. Fortunately,
while minor cheating like talking on the phone with a friend is easier online, detection of more elaborate schemes
is also far easier online. Besides the hand histories that all players have available to them, online poker card rooms
have a wide variety of cheat and collusion detection techniques that range from the obvious to the very subtle.
Suppose a self-colluder has two computers, two Internet connections, and two identities. If the cheater plays as
Player A in a game only when he also has Player B in the same game, a red flag will be tripped. This means that even
if this person is cheating this way successfully, he also has to play his identities on separate tables a large percentage
of the time to try and avoid detection (and again, most cheaters are too
greedy and too stupid to do that).
Cardrooms can see all hands folded, so if a player knows he can go all-in with a King high flush because his partner
folded the ace previously, this can be easily observed by cardroom security personnel. The same with two players
whipsawing an opponent (raising back and forth, where one player has the nut hand). The cardrooms can see if one of
the players is doing something completely out of line.
Now here is the important thing. Each of the above two examples could go unnoticed by themselves. They probably would not trip
any automatic red flags. But, if both manipulations where done by the same players, and even if only one was reported, cardroom
security can look back over the logs of when these players played together, and now these separate actions, perhaps weeks apart,
can be pieces in a puzzle, independent bits of evidence that can create a vivid picture of a cheating partnership.
The best tool the card rooms have when it comes to detection is the eternal vigilance of honest players. Unlike b&m
casinos where hard evidence is difficult to come up with, where eyewitness suspicions and distant cameras are normally about
all there is to go on, with online cardrooms honest players don't need to provide evidence. They only need to provide suspicion.
In other words, online card rooms have at their disposal algorithmic red flags as well as honest player red flags. One incident
may seldom tell a whole story, but one incident can serve as a red flag that uncovers a fairly sophisticated web is dishonesty.
Idiot and inept cheaters tend to police themselves. Their behavior is so obvious they are detected very quickly.
Expert cheating is more dangerous, profitable for the cheats, and harder to detect, but online cardrooms have far
more tools to detect experts than b&m casinos. Again, the minor cheating of friends sharing information
about cards when one is not in a pot is nearly infinitely more prevalent online than in a casino, but fortunately
this most common bit of cheating is also seldom crucially helpful.
In a way, there is a trade off when comparing casino poker to online poker. Cheating occurs in all venues. It is
part of the game, like spitballs are in baseball. B&M casinos have more effective cheating that goes undetected.
Online cardrooms have more minor cheating that provides only a small edge.
In both cases though, the #1 weapon required to keep your money out of the hands of the crooked scum is to speak up to
casino and cardroom authorities. Don't be a nuisance by ranting about every questionable play you see, but don't keep your
major suspicions to yourself. The more cheaters kicked into the loser dustbin where they belong, the more money there is
for you, and the cardrooms, and even the weaker players - which means, squashing cheaters is a poker skill.
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