Online Poker Cheating: Is Internet Poker Rigged?
Many poker players are worried about the possibility of players cheating in online poker to gain an unfair advantage. There are two types of theoretical cheating that is usually discussed: The possibility of the sites rigging the deck, and the possibility of the players themselves either playing as a team or using a program to detect what their opponents cards are. Let’s discuss each of them in turn:
Poker Sites Cheating or Rigging the Deck
The reason that an online poker site would rig the deck, is argued as being an entirely business decision: they rig the deck to either make more rake when everyone gets dealt a big hand, or to let new players win so that they stay on the site for longer.
From a practical point of view, this is simply not feasible. An online poker site is basically a license to print money. There will be thousands of player (if not hundreds of thousands) playing around the clock, and paying rake to the site constantly. Some poker sites make literally billions of dollars per year. It would be completely idiotic for a major site to risk this huge amount of cash flow just to scrape out an extra teensy bit of rake by dealing one player KK and another player AA more often than usual. It would be like betting your house to win 25c.
To date, there has not been any online poker site that has been discovered to be rigging the deck. If you are particularly concerned though, you might find it best to stick to the two biggest sites online, being Full Tilt Poker and PokerStars. Each of these sites get their software independently tested to make sure that there is no way the cards can be rigged.
Player Cheating or Collusion
The most common form of player cheating online is called “collusion”. Colluders work in teams to either bet other players out of the pot, put combined pressure on shorter stacks (in tournaments), to share information about what cards they each have, or to “chip dump” to one another. Chip dumping is where 2 or more players will enter the same tournament or SNG, and one player will then deliberately lose his chips to the other player, giving that player a greater chance of winning. Collusion over any length of time is can be detected by any experienced player, and also through site security teams. All good poker sites have automated software that interprets players’ betting patterns to detect if they are colluding, and this software is extremely intelligent. People are often caught when they attempt to gain an unfair advantage by collusion, and when this happens the poker sites ban the account, confiscate the colluder’s money and give it back to the players who were disadvantaged. If you have reason to suspect players are colluding or “team playing” against you, report the players involved to the site so that they can be investigated.
With regards to players having access to software that allows them to see other players hole cards or even predict what the next card to be dealt is, it simply can’t be done anymore. When online poker was new, there were several cases of such things happening, usually by players who worked for the poker site and had access to inside information. Over the last decade however, online poker security and software has developed to close these holes, and now all the mainstream poker sites use software that makes such security breeches impossible.
Should Your Worry About Online Poker Cheating?
The answer is that although player cheating is a possibility in online poker, just as it is in every other game, there ARE things you can do to protect yourself against it. If you notice players acting in a way that makes you suspect collusion, report them to the site to be investigated. Also make sure that you only play on reputable, mainstream websites and poker rooms where you know that they have active security teams. The two biggest are Full Tilt Poker and PokerStars. The links to these sites are included below.
