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Home >> About Poker >> Cheating in poker
Cheating in poker
Cheating in online poker is a sticky subject. You probably ask yourself all the time if you are getting cheated after a bad beat when playing online poker. Does cheating really happen in online poker? There is little doubt that cheating in poker does occur, but it doesn’t happen as often as some people might think.
There are two main types of cheating that occur in online poker. You can really term the two types active or passive.
Active cheating / Team play
Active cheating works just like it does in real life, where players work in teams to raise other players out of the pot or juice the pot for each other. This play manages to maximize value bets because both players are as far as money goes, playing as one. Fortunately, this style of play can usually be detected by the trained eye, although reporting this action usually will not result in anything. The poker sites usually have automated software that tries to interpret if you are engaged in this type of betting. We would imagine it tries to find if you are raising weak hands when you normally don't or if you constantly do better when playing with a certain player, etc. People are caught using these methods, just so you know.
Passive cheating / Collusion
Another concern is collusion. There is some collusion going on, but again, it’s not something we lose sleep over. To us it’s kind of like worrying about whether we got overcharged on our $150 grocery bill for .20 cents. We don’t care. First of all, online poker sites are very good at spotting players that collude. If you often sit at a table with the same player, they’re going to take a look at your account. There are patterns they look for. You don’t have to be playing from the same IP in order to get busted. If you and a buddy talk on the cell from two different points on the globe and think you’re not going to get caught, think again. They’ll notice that you adjust your betting pattern whenever you’re in the same room as your buddy, based on his play. They have programs that can spot this stuff quite easily. We know of a guy that once got a refund from an online poker site because it was determined that two players at the table he was sitting at were colluding. We also know of a buddy that was booted from a SNG because his girlfriend was in the same game. They do catch this stuff.
Poker robots
Cheating with poker robots is different than collusion between players because the robots are not real online internet poker players but rather a piece of computer software, which plays online internet poker very well and can play 24 hours a day all week over and over again, to pocket their owner a nice sum of Dollars.
All though poker robots pose the single biggest threat to the online poker industry, It is important that you understand that poker robots cannot influence your game in any other way than a good poker player playing at the table can. That is, the robot is not capable of affecting the outcome of the cards or play in a way that makes you win or lose more or less than you should have had the robot been a real and good poker player.
Conclusion
Team play and collusion are much more rare forms of cheating simply because cheaters are by definition dishonest, and team play and collusion (over any significant period of time) requires trust and an honest accounting of profits. Degenerate losers don't make good, trusting, trustable, longterm partners.
You might get a bit scared by hearing about robots, however. Thankfully, there are still very few robots actually playing in real money games and most of the leading online internet poker rooms are investing huge resources in both automated and manual counter measures to track robot play as well as any other form of cheating. In addition it is fortunately very difficult to encode a piece of poker robot software that can beat a table of experienced poker players as poker is not easy to map due to the much hidden information and " contextual game theory" where a player must try to make his opponents make mistakes. So any program would have to " think" and know how to bluff and lay traps.
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