Recently I quit my job at a poker site. Before the period of working for the company I was a happy customer, played over 100 000 hands there, mostly in lower midstakes.

I have played on four other sites. I win, but not enough to be a pro.

Part of my job was monitoring the integrity of the games, and with this experience I am now somewhat disillusioned. I will have to admit that this company put quite a lot of effort in keeping the games fair, most of the competitors do less. Still as a final score for the results I would give something like 6/10. I am afraid many poker sites would score 1 or 2 on my scale.

Here are some common misconceptions, well, at least I used to hold these:


1. Cheating isn't very common.

Unfortunately it is, and there are a growing number of systematic cheaters. Poor players cheat without even realizing it, there are gray areas. Often they keep losing despite the cheating.

But there are also very capable cheats, and they can be pretty hard to catch.

I suppose you all are aware that there is no way to get prosecuted for cheating in online poker. You can only lose the money on your account.

The games now keep getting tougher to beat, decent players who made a nice profit a couple of years ago can hardly break even. Find another hobby, or bend the rules a bit?

Of course opportunities for cheating are different in different poker games. Some games can be very clean.


2. Keeping the game honest is the top priority for a pokerroom.

It's not at all simple to perform this policing, it takes resources. You have to have a fairly large organization devoted just for this task, and very competent management running the show.

The returns for this investment are not obvious. As an example of the opposite; AP and UB are still in the business, despite getting caught of the worst imaginable fraud.

It is economically more sensible to hire a person to the Marketing department than to the Game Security. Same priorities go for the development of the software, and without proper databases and search tools the job is simply impossible.

Keeping up the appearance of a fair game is fairly easy and helps marketing, but who knows what's really happening inside. The top players used for promoting the sites don't have anything to do with monitoring the game.


3. When a cheater gets caught, situation will be handled fairly and efficiently.

There are many levels of cheating, often not clear if cheating was accidental or intended. It is hard to figure out what actual damage was done to the other players. Usually the loot has been cashed out already, and fair distribution of compensation to the victims is higher mathematics.

I suppose many sites have made a straightforward decision to just keep the money and not refund anything.


4. Policing is handled by skillful poker players.

Most of them have played low stakes NL and/or tournaments. Job gets rather boring after a while, clever guys tend to get promoted to better positions.

Many have trouble reading the board in Omaha, let alone hi-lo.


5. Risk of getting caught is big.

In some games, at some sites, there is a risk of getting caught.

Sometimes it's practically impossible to get caught.

Here is a little story about this. A player wanted to point out a loophole in the game security because he suspected another player of taking advantage, he sent several complaints about it. Nothing was done, so he started using it himself to prove his point, did it for months and cashed out cool $300.000 in the process. Finally he got caught, got a slap on the wrist, and the security problem didn't get fixed. (It got fixed eventually, but that's another story.)


6. Once you get caught, it's pretty hard to do it again.

It's harder to get caught second time. Opening multiple accounts is fairly easy, then you will just have to figure out why you got caught the first time and not repeat the same mistakes.

I can't think of any practical method for preventing this.


7. It is a cool job working for a poker site.

At the moment I should be sending cheerful job applications, and this is what gets written. I may have to hire a ghostwriter.


To end my first post on a positive note; I don't think the shuffle is rigged!

This guy is probably legit.

Very good first post.

OP, since you mention accidental cheating in your posts... What do you think are the most common case of "accidental cheating" and how much that represents compared to intentional cheating ?

Nice topic.

Things like friends not wanting to bust each other in a tourney, or players chatting about bubble play in satellites.

Annoying for players who play by the rules, happens regularly, but insignificant in terms of money won or lost.

The problem I have with this post is that it is written from the POV that cheating is something that requires a great deal of knowledge about poker and poker play and that it requires a lot of very skillful manpower which is not being deployed.

In fact, detection of cheating requires a very large amount of data processing and some moderately skillful use of statistics.

Whilst it's not impossible that some sites do not show the required amount of diligence we see enough cases here of people getting busted for fairly tenuous links with other players to know that a good deal of work is being done.

I would question the logic of a site risking its name by not paying a few thousand to get the stats software written and then deploying a couple of dedicated PC's to just churn through the data.


PS. If any sites haven't made that investment please feel free to PM and we can discuss terms.

I thought it'd be a good idea to post here so that people don't think this is me and get me into trouble! I'm not saying anything here from insider knowledge, and of course I don't have any recent insider knowledge in any case.

Of course there's a growing number - but I don't think it's growing in proportion to the entire player base. There're more players, so there're more cheaters, that's no surprise. Anecdotal evidence doesn't mean a thing.

JJProdigy comes to mind - but even he's been caught a few times at the cost of tens/hundreds of thousands to him. The people who cheat in this manner are few and far between, and it's highly likely that we know who they all are. It's hard to get the contacts and the ability to cheat in the manner that JJProdigy does, and to get to that point without doing anything detectable is unlikely because of the amount of time it takes. You can't start off with the knowledge of how to avoid detection, you have to learn it.

I disagree because game security is what most of the biggest raking players care about. They're where a lot of the company's profit comes from, and they're not going to change because of a marketing compaign. The AB/UB numbers didn't change much, but many of the biggest raking players have left because they don't trust the site anymore. These sites lost money.

No-one said it would be easy. Court cases are often very complicated, but it doesn't mean that the law is pointless and we can't trust in it (unless you live in Iran). I wouldn't be surprised to hear that some cheaters get off and some innocent people are banned. That's exactly what happens in criminal trials too, but it works most of the time. It's unreasonable to expect perfection in either system.

You don't need to be great at poker to catch colluders. You don't need to know a thing about poker to catch multi-accounters. I used to work in the collusion investigation team for PokerStars and have looked at a lot of cases, and the skillset for finding colluders is not the same skillset as beating $400nl.

Sure, but that's fine - if you don't know Stud hi/lo, you send the case to someone who does.

I largely enjoyed working for a poker site, and I intend to do so again one day. Of course parts of it suck, but everyone says that about their jobs.

In your experience do most of the people colluding focus on the higher stakes games, or is there a more even distribution? Also do you have any concept of what the numbers are, like out of every 1000 people playing at any one time would you be able to ball park how many of them are likely to be the "systematic cheaters" you are talking about?

Most colluders are in small stakes games, and it's mostly in SNG. SNG are the easiest way to collude and perhaps the only way to do it without being completely obvious. However, if you search the database and find player A and player B are playing 90% of their SNG together, you can review their play and there's no way they can hide if they're colluding when you can see their holecards. Most collusion is simply softplay, where people often aren't aware they're even doing anything wrong.

Cash colluders are almost always easy to spot as a player, and when you can review hands with all the holecards revealed, they're trivially easy to spot.

The higher you play when you collude, the more money you put at risk by definition. If there's (say) a 10% chance of being caught every day you play, you need to increase your money on that site by > 10% on top of what you'd beat the game for normally. To do that, you have to be really obvious what you're doing, which increases your chances of being caught, and so on. It's a vicious circle.

Colluders are caught very quickly as a result of the first two paragraphs. When there're 30k real money players on the site at once I'd be surprised if there were 30 people colluding at the time, including unintentionally (i.e, being unaware of the rules). The overwhelming majority of the time, it's more like zero people maliciously colluding.

Hi Sciolist,

At the time I worked at Pokerstars the easiest and most profitable way to cheat wasn't collusion but all-in abuse.

We both know that there are always plenty of sit&go collusion complaints around to keep any number of "poker specialists" busy. To review this sort of collusion is fairly easy (colluders usually aren't "thinking players"), but the procedure of handling the cases was complicated and time consuming. It may have been o.k. earlier when the site was smaller, but now a huge bureaucracy was running just to handle this issue.

And the management pretty much shared your optimistic view that other kind of cheating doesn't exist.

The disconnection all-in protection feature was eventually removed from the software last August, but before that there was a year-long comedy of errors. During that period the action in games like Seven card stud and Omaha hi-lo practically died, when players started competing at this art of disconnection. It was sort of a freeroll, because the policy was not to sanction anyone getting caught, just to remove their all-in protection privilege for a month.

Quite competent collusion-catchers were a bit like fish out of water handling these all-in abuse cases. Blatant high stakes Omaha hi-lo all-in abuser could be complained about for months and reviewed five times by five different poker specialists before all-in privilege was finally taken away, to be promptly returned after the month was over.

I wouldn't call that a particularly sophisticated form of cheating. I am not sure if they are able to catch all others.

Reading discussion forums leads me to think that many other sites handle game integrity issues worse than Stars does.

That's why we're all screwed.


And now, we have some rare footage of the Collusion Investigation Team in action...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GfEh9...eature=related

Dunno, I was probably involved in setting that bureaucracy up :]

Even if it takes a while to resolve, the players are frozen whilst they're being reviewed, so it isn't harmful to the integrity of the site.

Well, that's a specific case so I obviously don't know anything about it. I do know that I banned people for repeated all-in abuse though. And in any case, it's not a problem anymore. I don't see it as a reason to be pessimistic now.

I agree that this is probably true. I heard stories of a now defunct site where the poker experts could search through only the last 100 hands of a player. If nothing happened in those hands (generally as the complaint was older than 100 hands), they just sat on it for a while then replied saying "yeh, it's fine, don't worry".

I don't think FTP or Party have this problem though, and I'm not well informed enough to talk about some of the other big sites with any certainty.

However, the chances are that the bigger you get, the more you look into this kind of thing because you can afford it. There are 6 sites the same size or bigger than PS when I first started working there (including PS itself obviously) so it's reasonable to assume they have similiar amounts of money to spend on catching cheaters as PS did at the time. PS is probably still the best at it from sheer practice though.

I think I know who you are (though obviously won't tell anyone), but I have a feeling you are unduly pessimistic because you worked on this for a while. I did the same job for a good amount of time too but think that passing time gives you a more optimistic perspective.

Whoa, there!

That's a bit of a jump.

From a few people colluding to no great profit to themselves and watched over by a team of security specialists and a poorly implemented protection feature that did not apply to the most popular games and has now been removed anyway, you have jumped to "we're all screwed".

That's not a valid conclusion from the facts presented.

There are a fair few people here making good money from online poker, either for fun or as a living, so we're certainly not all screwed yet.

i was wondering
1. how much does poker site pay you to play poker
2. your own money or poker site's money?
3. do you get to keep the winning?
4. do you get rakeback/bonus too?
if so. where do i apply..lol

I disagree.

I suppose you are talking about collusion in no-limit hold'em here? I wouldn't generalize it to all cash games.

Looks like it works the other way around. When traffic increases this side of the business easily gets neglected.

Nah, it's just that sometimes supply outstrips demand. It happens all the time - it takes ages to train someone to do the job but the amount of people required for a job can suddenly (and often inexplicably) increase in a much shorter time.