How To Identify Cheaters in Online Poker

If you've come across this page looking to find out how to cheat in online poker, then look no further. This page will not help you cheat, it is intended to help people spot cheaters, and tell them what to do when they see them.

Many people are concerned about cheaters in poker. They feel, and rightfully so, that the cheaters can be the difference between a winning poker session and a losing poker session. Thus that cheaters should be avoided at all costs, and moreover that they should be identified and punished where ever possible.

There are several different forms of cheating possible in poker, and they should be distinguished between what is possible in live games and what is possible online.

In online games you are much less likely to encounter physical cheating, because it is simply impossible to mark the cards or stack the deck in an online game. However, you are much more likely to encounter different forms of collusion in an online games. Usually two or more people telling each other their cards over the phone or on AIM while they play at the same table. Because collusion is the most common form of cheating in online poker, I will first talk about how to identify it.

A first rule of thumb is that most cheaters are inept. They are not doing anything that will make them win in the long term. They are in it for the short term, trying to make a few hundred dollars right now, in the long term they are very likely to get caught. Because of this most people colluding at online poker employ unsophisticated techniques. The most common being they will try to trap another player between them while they get into a raising war, when on of them holds a nut hand. They player trapped between them loses several bets thinking that they might as well call one more bet since they have put in so many already. Then, after the player gets sick of putting in bet after bet after bet, they dump the hand, and one of the colluders also folds, leaving the other to win the pot uncontested, and without having to show his hand.

The best way to identify this kind of cheating is just to watch for two people who often get involved in pots with one another, but rarely take each other to a showdown. If they go to a show down they know that they will have to show a good hand to account for all the betting that took place. Since they don't usually both have good hands, they can't afford to let people see what they have.

If you ever suspect collusion, the greatest weapon that you have is to report the hand to the poker room. They have all the hands ever played, with all the cards ever dealt logged in their servers. Thus they can look back at the player's histories and see if they often sit at the same table, and if they play differently against each other than they do against every one else. If they spot cheaters, they usually confiscate their accounts and refund money to the people that were scammed. Remember, the whole online poker industry is built on trust of the online casinos. If people are able to cheat in the long term without being punished the industry will go down the drain and the poker rooms will lose billions of dollars. Thus it is in the casino's best interest to catch the cheaters.

Another way people suspect other people are cheating is by using programs to predict cards or to see other player's hands. In fact, if you google 'cheating at poker' right now, you will probably get several sites offering to sell you programs that will let you cheat at poker. You will make millions! Not. These programs are scams. If they worked the proprietor would not sell them for a couple bucks or even a couple hundred. If they worked a person could literally make 10's of thousands of dollars a day multi-tabling middle limit Party Poker. The fact is, online poker security is some of the best in the world. The large online poker rooms employ state of the art security techniques and the best people. What most of these so called cheating programs actually do is install a back door into your computer to allow the person who wrote the software to see what your cards are. So in a sense they do allow cheating, just not to your benefit. What should you do if you bought the program, found out it doesn't work, and now suspect that you are being scammed? Just run a good virus scan and spyware scan and they should catch the malicious programs.