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Poker Tournament Cheating and “Semi-Cheating”
By Arnold Snyder
(Excerpted from The Poker Tournament Formula, Cardoza Pub., 2006. 375 pages)
© Arnold Snyder 2006
There are a thousand ways to cheat at poker, including all of the classic card-cheating moves—from daubing or bending cards, to slipping in a pre-arranged “cold deck,” to working in collusion with the dealer to false shuffle, stack the deck, and deliver losing hands to unsuspecting marks. Most of these classic techniques, however, are more easily pulled off in private games. And although many of these techniques have been used in major casino poker rooms, they are not highly effective in tournament play, where players have little control over which house dealer is assigned to their table, which decks of cards will be used, and which players will be seated where in the tournament. So, I’m not going to waste much space in this article on the classic poker cheating scams. If you play in big money games, and especially if you play in private games, I’d advise you to invest in a 2-DVD set by Sal Piacente titled Poker Cheats Exposed. Sal’s new DVDs show many of the classic techniques and include a lot of moves I haven’t seen demonstrated before.
What this article on poker cheating will cover are the specific types of cheating I've found in today’s poker room tournaments, both live and online, because many types of poker tournament cheating are different from the classic card manipulation moves. I'll not only cover the types of cheating, but specific examples I saw in recent tournaments, and the countermeasures for them.
Collusion with Other Players
The most common type of cheating I've seen in the fast, small buy-in poker tournaments is collusion between two or more players who share information about their hands via secret signals. Because poker is a game based on trickery and deception, some players apparently feel that any type of deception is fair. To them, it’s all poker. So, let me point out that collusion is wrong. It is cheating. It is not poker, but a form of theft.
Most players who attempt collusion cannot beat poker with skill. Thankfully, they are often just as bad at crime as they are at poker.
How Does Collusion Work?
Two players working in collusion attempt to steal pots by raising and reraising each other to get opponents with legitimate but marginal hands to fold. Usually, one player will have a strong, or at least playable, hand, while the other will be in the pot simply to jack up the bets to the point where everyone else folds.
Once the competition is gone, the weak hand folds to a raise, and the strong hand picks up the pot. The strong hand, assuming it is strong enough to warrant the aggressive play, can also voluntarily show his cards at this point to make his play look good. If the strong hand is truly a monster, the weak hand can stay in the pot for the purpose of building the pot to keep other players in it. For example, he can throw in calls to give marginal hands the incentive to stay in the pot. And if other players are aggressively betting, or are obviously not going to go away because they have so much already committed to the pot, the weak hand can go into the raising/reraising routine with the monster hand to suck in even more bets. The only important thing the weak hand must do in order to pull off this scam is refrain from showing down the cards he was playing.
And there are other advantages to collusion. Just knowing two other cards that are not available to be dealt is an advantage. If I am dealt an AJ and my partner has a J8, I know that the value of my jack is greatly diminished. If I’ve got pocket sevens, and my partner has a J7, I’ll throw my sevens away before the flop since my chance of flopping a set has been cut in half.
If both colluding players have strong hands, the weaker hand can fold if another player is aggressively contesting the pot. The colluders will not give a third party any chance to beat both of them. For example, if I’m holding AK, and my partner has AQ, and an ace comes down on the flop, the AQ will fold fast. If my aces get beat because an opponent shows down a set, that opponent will get my money, but not my partner’s. In an honest game, the AQ might not fold, and the winner might get twice what he got from me.
Many of these types of collusion plays are more effective in low-limit ring games than they are in tournaments, and they are especially strong in short-handed play where two or three colluders can work together to take off a single mark. One problem tournament formats present to colluders is the fixed number of chips each player in a tournament has at his disposal—and this is especially true in a fast tournament where players do not start with large chip stacks. Here’s how colluders adjust their scam for tournaments....
Poker Tournament Cheating: Chip Dumping
The most common method of player collusion I’ve seen in small buy-in no-limit tournaments is chip dumping. Two or more players who have an agreement to share tournament wins and losses play against each other very aggressively, with the goal of having one player end up with all of their chips. Simply, Player A dumps his chips to Player B.
Chip dumping can occur at any point in a tournament. It can happen at the first table when the tournament begins, and it can happen at the final table. In tournaments where players who are colluding in this way are assigned to different tables, there is simply an agreement to pull off the move if and when they get to the same table. In many of the small buy-in tournaments, this is not a problem. At some casino poker rooms, players are allowed to choose their starting table and seat, so colluders can simply pick seats at the same table. Even if seats are assigned in the tournament, there is still a good chance that colluders will get together at some point in the tournament, as many of these small buy-in tournaments have very small fields—often ten or fewer tables.
Many players believe, erroneously, that players on the same “team” might cheat by “soft-playing” each other. Not true. Soft-playing is what husbands and wives, or good friends (amateurs), do with each other when they play at the same table—checking instead of betting, giving up a pot instead of playing back with a legitimate hand. You frequently see this type of play in small stakes limit games. But in a no-limit tournament, it usually wouldn’t make sense for a cheater to soft-play a cohort. The value is in the opposite approach—playing much harder against your teammate for the purpose of getting all of your chips into one stack.
Some poker rooms make it too easy for colluders to cheat in this way in the small buy-in tournaments. Allowing players to pick their tables and seats is a poor policy. Even worse is a policy that allows players who go all-in against each other to not turn up their cards, even when there are no other hands in action on the table. When players must display their hands for all-in pots, when no further action is possible, a chip-dumping team will at least have to find dumping opportunities where both players’ all-in actions appear to make sense. With no requirement to show hands, the dumping is harder to detect. After the river card is dealt, the player with the legitimate hand turns over his cards, but all the dumper has to do is quickly muck his hand.
But even requiring players to show their hands in all-in situations will not completely solve this problem. Because many experienced players will ask the dealer to show the mucked cards, chip dumping teams will have the player with the trash cards make the all-in move, and the player with the legitimate strong hand call the all-in. This way, if the bad hand gets displayed, it will simply look like the all-in raiser was making a move on the pot, hoping to steal it without a call.
Can anything be done about chip dumping? I doubt it. It would help if all poker rooms required all-in hands to be displayed when the action was completed. It would help if players were randomly assigned their tables and seats upon sign-up. But many small buy-in tournaments are not taken very seriously by the tournament directors. They see the participants as amateur locals and tourists who like to sit with their buddies and girlfriends in a social setting. They’re simply trying to attract a crowd, not turn away potential players who are mainly looking for fun.
And even with more careful policies, the most talented chip dumpers would not be deterred. Rather than dumping all of their chips to a cohort on a single all-in play, they could simply dump them on a series of plays, without ever going all-in, to avoid tough questions. Even when you see it—and I’ve seen it a number of times—how can you prove it?
Poker Tournament Cheating: Final Table Dumping
Cheats can get the most value out of chip-dumping from dumping chips at a final table. If two teammates are, say, 8th and 9th in chips when they arrive at the final table, and dumping can get one of them into 3rd or 4th place in chips—and in serious contention for first place—that is an enormously profitable play, because tournament prize money is heavily skewed toward the top-end finishers.
At a final table, soft-playing by two teammates might make sense if both players are very well situated to win, or at least finish in two of the top four places. But even at a final table, chip-dumping is by far the more profitable cheating move for players who own a piece of each other’s results, unless both players are inordinately well-stacked.
I don’t think there will ever be a way to stop poker players from forming “team banks.” Nor do I think that team banks should be disallowed. With the huge buy-in costs of the major no-limit tournaments today, and the enormous playing fields that make it a long shot for even the best players to make it to a final table, many of the top players do have prize-sharing arrangements with other pros. It’s the only way to survive. Players in small buy-in tournaments do the same thing. Most players who own percentages of each other, or who are playing on team bankrolls, are simply trying to ride out negative fluctuations, not dump chips or find partners for collusion schemes. Pro gamblers have been making these types of agreements forever. It’s an intelligent response to a very risky business.
But if two players who own a percentage of each other should wind up at a final table together, might not the player with the short stack feel better if he lost his chips to his teammate, as opposed to some other player at the table? Even without a prearranged chip-dumping plan, won’t his natural instincts as a gambler tell him that this would be the advantage play?
Poker Tournament Cheating: Chip Passing
Two cheaters who are not at the same table can practice a variation of chip dumping in which one player surreptitiously removes some of his high-denomination chips from the table and passes them to his cohort during a scheduled break. Players have been accused of this type of chip dumping even in the big money tournaments, and it is very difficult to stop. In the major tournaments that last many hours or even days, players need only wait to palm chips until their table is being broken, or they are being moved to a new table where their opponents do not know what their chip stack looked like just moments before. The removal of chips from one player’s stack, the passing to his cohort, and the addition of the chips to the cohort’s stack may be hours apart.
In the fast small buy-in tournaments, players don’t have this luxury of time, and that is why they sometimes get caught. In a tournament that lasts only five hours, the value of chips removed two hours earlier will have been diminished too much by the rising blinds. So, in the small buy-in tournaments, some cheats don’t even wait for scheduled breaks to make this move. One player simply exits his table for a restroom stop or smoke break, and his partner at a different table follows him. If there are sharp players at the table of the player who pocketed chips from his stack, they will quickly inform the dealer that the absent player’s stack is missing chips, and the tournament director will be called over before the player even gets to the restroom. I have several times seen players caught red-handed, with tournament chips in their pockets, attempting this ploy.
Poker Tournament Cheating: Auto-Dumping
Finally, I know of one player who has been caught in more than one Las Vegas poker room dumping chips to himself! He was removing high-denomination chips from one tournament, then bringing them into play in a different tournament at the same poker room. In some cases, he was reportedly buying the chips in a rebuy tournament where the chips were sold at a discount, then bringing them into other tournaments where the cost of chips was higher, most frequently when he appeared to have a good shot at the money. He was first caught doing this at a casino poker room downtown. They called a few of the other Vegas poker rooms where he was also known to play in tournaments, and one of the alerted poker rooms then caught him doing the same thing in their tournaments!
To show you how lightly the poker rooms take misconduct at the small buy-in poker tournaments, the player’s penalty for this scam—and he was caught red-handed—was temporary suspension from playing tournaments at the two casinos where he was caught. His penalty time is now up, and he is back in the tournaments at these same poker rooms after having had his hand slapped.
Card Switching at Poker
Some cheaters are so brazen that they will actually steal a card by mucking only one of their hole cards, then bring it back into play later when they need it—often much later in the tournament and at a different table! I have been at poker tournament tables where two cards of the same denomination and suit have suddenly appeared on the table. And I have seen another table where a dealer who was counting down the cards just after a table was broken came up short one card, and of course, the missing card turned out to be an ace. All the players at that table had already been sent to new tables. I only knew about it because it occurred at the table next to mine and I heard the dealer reporting the missing card to the tournament director.
Another player at my table who saw this same interaction told me later that he’d asked the tournament director whether the players from that table shouldn’t be searched to find the player who had stolen the card. The tournament director said something like, “I don’t have the authority to do that. I can’t get ten security guards in here to escort all of the players from that table off the floor where we can conduct full-body searches. I can’t stop the tournament for a few hours while this is going on. The casino manager would have to call Gaming Control for authorization to hold and search these players, and Gaming would probably tell us that we can’t search ten players because one of the ten might have stolen a card from a table. I’ll ask surveillance to look at the videos from that table to see if we can see who stole it. Or maybe we’ll see where that ace shows up later, and we can identify one of the players from that table. But there’s a good chance that whoever stole that card will be too scared to play it, and we’ll never see it again. He’ll have a souvenir, that’s all.”
Professional poker cheats who specialize in mucking cards in and out of games never try to muck a card out of one deck and into a different deck. What they do is steal a card on one hand, then sneak it back into the same game when they need it, while the same deck is in play. This way, there is never a problem with a missing card (unless the dealer decides to count down the cards while the cheat has the stolen card in his possession, in which case that card will quickly find its way onto the floor beneath the table). More importantly, there will never be a problem with two cards of the same suit and denomination showing up on a hand. But small buy-in tournaments attract a lot of amateurs, and the cheating in these tournaments is amateurish as well.
Technically, cheating at gambling is a felony in the state of Nevada and carries a one-year minimum sentence for anyone so convicted. Personally, I’d like to see the penalty imposed. If a player is caught stealing chips from a casino blackjack game, you can be sure he won’t just be temporarily suspended from the casino games, then invited back. Likewise, if an ace disappears from a deck of cards at a blackjack table, this will be taken very seriously by the casino’s game protection personnel. Stealing money from other players, however, especially in the low stakes tournaments, is simply not viewed with the same concern as stealing from the casino itself.
Poker Tournament Rebuy Dumping, or “Semi-Cheating”
In unlimited rebuy tournaments, one of the most common and blatant chip-dumping techniques is the maniac group play. Two or more players will continually go all-in against each other before the flop, even when neither of them has a legitimate starting hand, and sometimes even in the dark. The player or players who bust out simply buy more chips, and keep making the same move. In some cases, these players will even announce what they are doing.
This type of team rebuy dumping can be very profitable in small buy-in tournaments because rebuy chips are often sold at a discount, and may also provide more chips than the initial buy-in amount. These tournaments usually require a player to be below his initial buy-in amount in order to make the rebuy. By continually going all-in against each other, rebuyers are dumping chips to players who are not technically eligible to rebuy. Rebuy dumpers can amass monster chip stacks for one or more of their group very cheaply. The strategy works well because, no matter how bad the dumpers’ hands are, they are simply buying cheap chips for each other whenever they are the only players in the pot.
I’ve never seen this topic covered in any other tournament book, but I have seen numerous irritated players complain to tournament directors about players who are doing this. “They just keep going all-in against each other. Every hand. They’re not even looking at their cards!” Tournament directors generally shrug it off. “What can I do about it? They’re not breaking any rules.”
Since rebuy dumpers are open about what they are doing, and since poker room directors can see what’s going on but make no move to stop the chip dumping—and I’m not sure how they could stop it even if they wanted to—rebuy dumping is not really cheating. I label it “semi-cheating” because, although it may not violate tournament regulations in many poker rooms, it violates the spirit of the game. Poker is not a team sport. There should not be agreements between players, whether open or secret, to play or bet in pre-determined ways.
In a perfect world, there would be enforceable rules against rebuy dumping—and every other type of chip dumping. But in a no-limit tournament where a big part of the legitimate strategy is taking shots on bluffs, and where players are allowed to play like maniacs, betting in the dark, going all-in on trash, how could you enforce such rules?
So, rebuy dumping is simply an aggressive advantage play, perhaps unethical in terms of “normal” poker ethics, but not illegal. Players in major tournaments never have to worry about this tactic because the big money tournaments rarely have rebuy periods, and if they do, the rebuy chips are usually not discounted as they are in the small buy-in tournaments. You don’t really need discounted chips to make the strategy work if you are a skilled player, but paying multiple full buy-in costs will vastly decrease the value of the move.
One thing you can do if you have rebuy dumpers at your table is play against them exactly as you would against rebuy maniacs (who are discussed in the chapter on rebuy strategies in my book, The Poker Tournament Formula) by calling their all-ins yourself with your better-than-average hands. As mentioned in the rebuy chapter, these hands are: any ace, any king, any queen with a kicker of 8 or higher, any JT or J9, any suited connectors down to 87, and any pair. If you call rebuy dumpers down with these hands, you’ll usually make a good profit during this rebuy period. You will have to rebuy more often than you normally would during a rebuy period, but the chips are cheap. Rebuy dumping is so common in small buy-in tournaments, and so blatant, that many of the tournament regulars figure it out and quickly respond with this defense.
Early in my poker tournament career, I played in a $40 buy-in, unlimited-rebuy tournament at Orleans where all of the players at one table had agreed in advance to go all-in on every hand. By the end of the one-hour rebuy period, the table had made a total of 113 rebuys. (In fact, the tournament director announced that this table had set a record at Orleans for the number of rebuys made by a single table.) That comes to an average of about 11 rebuys per player, leaving the average chip stack at that table more than three times the size of the average chip stack at any other table.
But, were the rebuy chips purchased by the players at this table worth the price? This table paid more than $2,600 in buy-in and rebuy costs for a $40 buy-in tournament.
I busted out early and didn’t stick around. One of the players who had participated in the rebuy dumping at that table—but didn’t make it to the final table—told me later that the players at that table had no agreement to share profits and losses. Their only agreement was to go all-in on every hand during the rebuy period. He said that three of the players from that table did make it to the final table, but he didn’t know where they finished in the money.
If these three players all finished in the bottom five positions, they would not have made $2,600 between them to even cover the actual cost of the chips, though they might individually have profited a small amount since they were not sharing their wins with their “team.” With middle position finishes, they might have had a break even play. If one of them finished first or second, then their rebuy dumping strategy paid off. Second place paid somewhere around $3,000.
In any case, if you have rebuy dumpers at your table, be prepared to make a few extra rebuys yourself. It will be worth it. The dumpers should set you up pretty well in chips by the end of the rebuy period. And before you get irritated with the dumpers, think of it this way: If a few smarter players, who may not be among the world’s top poker players but have more savvy than the tourists, realize there’s a way to “buy” a seat at the final table with a legal rebuy strategy, then I say more power to them. We’re all in this for the money, aren’t we? Believe me, if you call the dumpers down with better-than-average hands as defined above, you will make money in the long run from rebuy dumpers, so don’t let them irk you. Any players who use this strategy against them will profit. So, take advantage of the rebuy dumpers whenever they appear at your table. Let them buy some chips for you.
Poker Cheating Online
There are two types of “cheating” that online poker players most worry about. One is play by “bots,” or computer software programmed to play the hands. Bots were never a concern in live poker rooms because they were never a possibility, and there is some debate over whether bots really qualify as cheating online. The other is “collusion” between two or more players who share information about their hands via telephone or private online messages. Collusion has always been a problem in live poker games, where colluders use secret signals to transfer information, and it’s the same problem in the online games. Everyone acknowledges that collusion is cheating, but how dangerous is it, and what can be done about it?
Poker Bots
There are two types of bots that may be of concern to online players. The first is a program designed to play a human player’s hands automatically, without the knowledge or involvement of the other players at the table or the online poker room. The second type is a program employed by the poker room itself, which gives the appearance that all players at the table are human. In this case, the bot would be playing with the house’s money against whatever real players are at the table.
I haven’t heard much discussion of bots being used in online tournaments except in the single-table sit’n’gos. Even so, I don’t think most players who are skillful enough to make money themselves should be highly concerned about such bots. Most skilled players would find it hard to believe that a computer program could beat them. Furthermore, many professional online players would acknowledge that their own online play—when carried out on 4 or more simultaneous tables, sometimes using multiple computer monitors—is not a whole lot different from what a bot might be programmed to do. This type of “assembly line” play precludes much attention to individual players at the tables, other than the players’ prior actions on the current hand. The pros who employ multi-table tactics simply make their decisions on their hands according to a formula based on their cards, their position, the prior action on the round, etc.
More on the Human Poker Bots
The Internet has provided a way for many skillful poker players to go from hobby level to full-time pro, even on a relatively small starting bankroll. A $10/$20 limit player who is capable of earning $10,000 per year in the live casino poker rooms really can’t afford to quit his job and play poker full-time. If this same $10/$20 player moves his game online, however, he’ll often find that he can earn $12-$15,000 annually (playing only one table at a time). He’ll lose the part of his win rate that he was getting from his ability to read his opponents’ body language, but this loss is more than made up for by the speed of the games online, the savings on tips to dealers, the lower house rake, and the easy home access to play at all hours. He’s simply able to play more hours per week, at a faster clip, and with lower expenses.
As soon as this player discovers that he can play two tables simultaneously almost as easily as one, then four tables almost as easily as two, his day job is likely to start taking a back seat to his poker play. Without increasing his strategic skills one iota, he’s seen his game go from a potential $10,000 per year income—that he couldn’t afford to quit his job to realize—to a real $50,000-$60,000+ in earnings per year on the same-size bankroll.
Personally, I have no moral objection to any player creating a bot to play and using his bot in the public online poker rooms. I admire such players for their ingenuity. Unskilled players have to learn to play poker, and whether they are schooled in the fundamentals by a bot or a human who plays like a bot makes very little difference. The lessons cost the same.
There are popular commercially available poker simulation software programs that essentially are nothing but a collection of poker bots that you can play against on your home computer. There are dozens of different cyber-players, from which you can choose your opponents, all set to play with varying degrees of skill and with varying degrees of aggression or passivity, looseness or tightness in starting hand selection, and so on.
If you practice with one of these programs, you'll find it’s soon easy to beat these players. You know which players are tight, loose, passive... which players try to steal pots, which ones will call you down. No matter how “good” they are, they’re predictable. (And, frankly, these bots aren’t very good players.)
I think the main worry over players using bots is that as artificial intelligence advances, the bots may be able to beat more and more players at ever-higher levels, and gambling conglomerates may start to maintain armies of bots to get rich in the online poker rooms. Should this occur, online poker as we know it may disappear. These bots could be used cheaply to dominate tables even at low-stakes levels. So, despite the fact that I would not categorize a player using a bot in the current Web environment as immoral, I know professional gamblers well enough to dislike this trend.
But I definitely have moral objections to any poker room’s use of bots to beat its own customers. Poker strategies are largely based on deception. Every player at every table employs deception and expects deception from his opponents. That’s the game.
But whether online or live, this battle of liars must take place on a level playing field. That means that the information available in the poker room itself—from the dealers, the cards, the rules and procedures, the shuffle, everything—must be equally available for all players. If an online poker room can rationalize representing its own bots as human players, then why not have the bots electronically peek at the players’ cards?
The poker room itself is never supposed to be part of the deception of the game in any way. Everything the poker room does must be above board. Think of how easy it would be for a poker room to devise a bot to beat its own players, even if the bot didn’t peek at players’ cards. The poker room has the hand histories of every player at its tables. Any poker room that would use its own bots to play hands, unless it purposely designed stupid bots that would lose, is not a poker room but a sting operation.
Poker Collusion Online
During the five weeks of the 2005 WSOP, which was held mostly at the Rio in Las Vegas, the Palms across the street ran excellent daily no-limit hold'em tournaments at noon. I was sitting at one of their tournament tables waiting for the tournament to begin when the subject of online play came up. One player said he would never play online for any serious amount of money because it’s too easy for players to collude with each other.
Another player said he didn’t worry about that because the online poker rooms all have software for detecting collusion between players at the same table.
The first player said, well, he and his buddies never got caught when they did it!
Then, a third player piped in and said he’d done it as well with some of his friends, but they had never been able to make any money with it!
So, far be it from me to tell you there’s no collusion happening online. If two players sitting at a live poker table would discuss it so cavalierly in front of strangers, I suspect it’s been tried a lot.
Let me point out once more that collusion is wrong. It is cheating. It is not poker, but an attempt at theft.
It is much easier for players to collude online than it is for them to collude in live games. In live games, they need finesse and subtle signals and timing and no small amount of nerve. Online, two players can be on the phone with each other telling each other exactly what their cards are every hand. That doesn’t take a lot of finesse.
But the online games also make it easier for colluding players to be caught after the fact. In a live game, once those cards hit the muck, everything about a hand is lost, except for what any players may remember. Online, there is no muck. The online poker room has a history of every hand, with every card every player was dealt and every action on every game.
True, there doesn't seem to be anyone looking at these hand histories, as a rule. But the histories are still there.
If you suspect collusion between two players, you can contact the poker room management and ask to have the hand histories reviewed. And collusion is not difficult to detect if you can see all of the hands.
Poker Cheating Online: How Does Online Collusion Work?
Online collusion works exactly the same as collusion in live games, except that telephone communication or instant messaging online between the colluders makes the scam a lot easier to pull off. Most collusion online would occur in the ring games, not the tournaments, though some colluders might work in the single-table sit’n’gos.
Most of the scams that colluders pull in the live games, from sharing card information, to jacking up pots then pushing others out with aggressive bets, to chip dumping schemes, etc., can be done online as well. The only types of scams colluders do in live games that cannot be done online are dealer-player collusion schemes and any type of chip passing that might occur off the table.
Online Poker Multi-Accounting
One form of online collusion that has occurred, even in the biggest and most popular poker rooms, is what the poker rooms call “multi-accounting.” A multi-accounter is a single player who opens multiple accounts under different names for the purpose of entering all of his identities in the same tournament. He can then collude with himself if two or more of his identities get to the same table. Again, this type of cheating would be much stronger in ring games, sit'n'gos or single-table satellites where you can guarantee yourself a seat at the same table as your alter-ego(s), than in bigger multi-table tournaments.
Those who get caught tend to be the dumb ones who don’t really know how to disguise themselves technologically. They play their identities through the same computer, or enter their different identities through the same IP address, or set up phony accounts in some way that can be traced and exposed. But all of these errors can be overcome. I doubt there is any way that the online poker rooms can protect themselves from the smarter multi-accounters who know how to avoid these amateur mistakes, other than by the same methods they use to identify colluders who have different identities.
So How Can the Online Poker Rooms Combat Collusion Cheating Schemes?
In addition to an online poker room’s ability to look at complete hand histories for their games, another problem colluders face online is that the poker room can see if two players always show up together, or move together from table to table, should they ever be asked to investigate a charge of collusion.
Unfortunately, there is very little legal recourse for players who have been cheated in online collusion scams. The U.S. has no laws regulating online gambling operations, and even if they did, none of the online poker rooms are located in the U.S. I do know of one instance where a multi-account tournament player had his account frozen by the poker room, and his last tournament win—after he was exposed as having played multiple identities in that tournament —was redistributed to the other players in the tournament. So, you shouldn’t hesitate to report suspected collusion if you see unusual betting patterns among two or more players. But don’t generally expect any result other than getting the colluders kicked out of the poker room, and don't assume the colluders are gone for good.
Why You Can Overcome Poker Tournament Cheating
It's true that poker tournament cheats, if they're cheating with an advantage, are getting some of their edge from you, and that must inevitably lower your own edge.
The cost of their edge, however, is spread out among all the players they face throughout the course of a tournament. So, the cost to any individual player will be relatively small on average.
And so far, I have found cheating in only a small percentage of the fast tournaments I've played. Plus, most of these cheating players, at least in the fast tournaments, aren't exactly Men the Master in terms of skill.
Also, you have to weigh this cost against your overall edge playing no-limit hold'em poker tournaments, which should be over 100% (and 200%+ would not be at all uncommon for a skilled player who knows optimal strategy). If you know what you're doing and are chosing tournaments wisely, I doubt you will notice any cheating effect at all in your results. (See The Poker Tournament Formula for how to adjust optimal strategy in fast tournaments.)
So, although you should be aware of poker cheating and take steps to fight back when you encounter it, don't let fear of it it turn you off of this excellent money-making
opportunity. ♠
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