Online poker

Yesterday's back of Phil Taylor got me off to a winning start for 2009, so long may that continue!

I've been reading The Gambler's blog and there is some interesting discussion on there of how online poker is bent. I thought I'd write a little about this as this is something I've thought about quite a lot in the past.

When I first opened online poker accounts when I was 18, the chance that it could be rigged and/or the other people at the tables are cheating was an obvious concern for me. I researched it a little bit and found out what the methods these cheats would be using were. Here they are:

If the actual site itself is dodgy
- There are many accusations flying around out there that "blah blah blah poker site is fixed, look at the cards they've dealt me!" I must confess that at one point I firmly believed that some sites were dodgy, but the simple fact of the matter is that there is no reason for a poker site to fix the cards. It doesn't get them any extra cash so there is no point. Some people say that they can deal big hands to a few people so that more money gets into the pot, so the site takes away more rake, but this is a crazy theory. Firstly, the amount of rake this would generate would be so, so negligible (I'm talking cents at the low limits). Secondly, this would only be occurring on a very small number of hands - the 'dodgy' cards don't come up all the time. In fact, most peoples gripes only seem to concern hands they themselves have been involved in - so it's more likely that it was them playing badly that lost them the hand, or simply an 'unlucky' card but I hate bringing the concept of luck into it.

If you are playing with cheats
This is a more likely scenario. However, if you are an online poker cheat and are making serious money by cheating people, this would take a fantastic amount of skill. On top of that, you will definitely get caught sooner or later.

How do you cheat at an online site? Probably the most frequent way people would try to do it is to sit at a table with a few of their mates, tell each other their cards and then wait for the innocent victim to play the hand as well. They can then just re-raise each other and force the innocent victim out of the pot, thereby stealing any money he had already put in. Now, it doesn't take a genius to recognise the pitfalls of this strategy. Firstly, you'll be making so little money and having to split it between your whole team. Secondly, after a few hands of doing exactly the same thing it will become very obvious to the victim what is happening and he/she will leave. Thirdly, you actually have to get dealt good cards, then play them appropriately, then hope that the victim doesn't have good cards as well, and then hope that your cards actually hold up when the board is dealt. In other words, you are still at the mercy of the deck. Just one big pot that the cheat loses could set him back hundreds or even thousands of hands of work. Finally, the reputable online poker sites are very good at spotting cheats and this pattern of behaviour I've described above is very obvious to spot for their software.

The other way of cheating has only been reported a few times in the history of online poker, and that is the case of a 'superuser', aka a player who can see the cards dealt to his opponents. This has occurred where an employee of the poker site has somehow smuggled out a piece of the software used to develop the site. This piece of software showed all the cards dealt to all the players face-up, and the purpose of it was to check that the site was paying the money to the correct winner. Obviously the person who uses this software in genuine online games will make a LOT of money, but I've only read about a couple of instances of this and in both cases the person has been caught and jailed.

Conclusion
The online poker player should be aware of the fact that yes, people could be cheating. But these cheaters are probably going to be losing rather than gaining money because they aren't actually going to know what they're doing properly, which actually makes them good people to have at the table. You should be more worried about playing good players. I also doubt there are many cheats at the low-limit tables because there's simply not enough money to be made. As for the higher limits, there are thousands of professional online poker players who have made millions of dollars from it. I've read articles by some of those players and they acknowledge that someone has probably tried to cheat against them before, but they're not worried about it happening on a large scale. There are also thousands more online pros who are happy to grind out reasonable money at the low/medium stakes. So yes, there can be cheats at online poker, but I don't think it's anything to worry about at all.