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Catching a Cheater

This section is on how to catch one or more people cheating at your table. Cheating takes place more often online since you don’t really know who you are playing against and for all you know the guy from Honk Kong is related to the girl from Fargo and they are working together to take all your money from you. This document will highlight a few of the more recognizable online cheating tactics. If you are worried about being cheated in home games you better be more careful about picking your friends.

The online poker market is the best place for crooks to accumulate. First off there are few if any regulations. Secondly even if you could prove you were cheated who do you report it to. Thirdly you are more likely to be cheated by the software (indirectly since they allow this cheating to take place and they do nothing about it). Lately another type of cheating was mentioned to me, that is, the software rigging the games to produce maximum rake and tilting the outcome of important hands towards the weak players and towards the high rake generating players and away from the professional players. This type of cheating is impossible to prove (unless you get a programmer from one of the software companies to admit to it).

Other players argue that the only place to play is online, since the thought is that the house wouldn’t dream of cheating a player since that could cost a site thousands of dollars a day. The truth is nobody really knows if anyone is being cheated but the professional poker players who observe the online texas holdem tournaments say that there has to be some kind of bias in the software since they have never seen so many action flops in a brick and mortar poker room.

Some folks say that the smaller stakes and computer generated dealers ensures that the game is less crooked than a live poker game. Since nobody touches the cards it is almost impossible for the game to be rigged. To the people who believe this I say Santa Clause will be bringing you a brand new plasma TV (50 inch) for Christmas. Get real. Of course it is possible to rig the game via software hosted on offshore servers and owned by offshore corporations.

Some players say that Eastern European computer hackers have the ability to hack into the software database and actually take over the games. To those players I say go and try to get around the SSL v3 / TLS v1 encryption and I will give you $100 if you make it. It is very unlikely to be an outside job but rather an inside job if there is any cheating going on. Online poker games are more secure than any land based tournament but still people go and play on the World Poker Tour every couple of months. Do these players know something that we don’t or are they just really trusting of Mike Sexton and Vince Van Patten.

The biggest cheating in online poker occurs when two or more players share their cards (over the phone) while they are playing at the same table together. Although the poker sites claim to have idiot proof collusion programs that can sniff out a cheat from a mile away I can personally tell you they couldn’t sniff out fresh popcorn cooking on your stovetop. All this anti collusion software is nothing more than a smoke screen to make you feel a little more comfortable about gambling on an online site. Luckily for you and me most players wouldn’t even know how to cheat properly and in fact if they tried they would likely lose their shirt in the process.

Although it is hard to catch and even harder to do, nevertheless here are a few things to look for if you think a couple of cheaters are at your table:

1. A group of players who always raise each other with another player in the hand
   and then fold out on the showdown so that nobody gets to see their cards.

2. Players who are slow at your table is a sign of something sneaky going on.

3. Players who never get to a showdown against each other.

4. Players who when winning leave the table together.

5. Two or more players who sit down at your table at the same time.

6. Two or more players who seem to be at two or more high level tables at the
    same time.

7. One player that seems to lose to another player often without getting upset at all.

8. Two or more players who are chatting to each other on the table or together
    bashing another player for playing badly.

9. Two or more players who are from the same city at the same table (always a tell).

If you see any of these things the best thing to do is leave the table and note the time and date before you leave and the last hand number and report it to the site administrators.

If nothing happens and you see it again contact the poker site administrators.
If again you have reported suspicious activity and nothing happens go to an alternative poker site and report that site to us here.

Here are a few of the sites we have had trouble with:

1. partypoker.com

2. noblepoker.com

3. empirepoker.com

4. 888.com

5. pokerstars.com

Please note that although we have heard some bad things about the above sites if you choose to play at any one of them you do so at your own risk.