Cheating At Poker

There's been a lot of talk about the most popular online poker sites rigging the deck. What are reasons that the sites might be cheating at poker? The so called rigging of the deck? It might be done to make the online poker sites more money in rake, or to give new online poker players some more artificial luck. The ultimate goal is to get them sucked into the online poker site.

Poker Player Sites says that cheating is going to happen in online poker. For a top online poker site to be cheating is pretty hard to believe. An online poker site like Party Poker may have some problems, but I'm sure even they know that rigging the deck would be the absolute worst thing they could do. They would be shooting themselves in the foot! There already exists a number of poker programs out there like Poker Tracker or Poker Edge that are able to monitor hand histories on online poker sites with an incredible amount of detail. I'm sure some sophisticated players who have the capability have written their own poker tools for that matter.

The programs create databases of games that occur on the top online poker sites, which can then be statistically run through to check for inconsistencies on those sites. Although most players would never play enough to make a case for statistical deviance, professional players would definitely notice strange deviations in deck shuffles, draws and other details with their trackers.

Poker Player Sites has not heard of any reports of bad deck dealing that has solid fact backing. That's not to say that there isn't, but the chances are unlikely.

Types of Cheating

Active cheating and Passive cheating are the most common forms of Online Poker cheating that does occur!

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 type of play allows the cheaters to maximize value bets because both players are kind of 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 top online poker sites usually have automated software that tries to interpret if you are engaged in this type of betting. I 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. Online poker cheaters are caught using these methods, just so you know.

Passive cheating is generally harder to catch and is also known as collusion. This is when players share their cards with one another to help them make better choices when it comes to Poker odds. For the most part, this type of cheating is normally not very beneficial to the cheaters to begin with except in a few situations where the information may actually help. With more than 2 players in on it however, it may become a problem! This is difficult to catch because cheaters will fold their poker hand when they realize another one of theirs has a stronger hand. Since you can't see mucked cards in online poker, it's impossible to know if people are folding monsters. However, the top online poker site may or may not be able to detect this type of play. For instance, if a flop showed A/K/2 and cheater #1 held KK while cheater #2 held AK, if cheater #2 folded to a bet from cheater #1, there should (one would hope) be some warning bells raised from the top online poker site.

Some Final Thoughts About Online Poker Cheating

Should you worry about cheating? No. You probably should not. At the higher limits, there may be more chances of Passive Cheating and even Active cheating. However, you should know that if you're losing at an online poker table- it's time to go! Don't fret too much over what you cannot control.

Again, if you still absolutely think that whatever site you are going to is cheating you out of your money, do yourself a favor and leave that site!