Actually a good point. Why always think the worst about your fellow man?

The setting in the OP unfortunately minimizes this possibility.

Maybe the best thing to do is immediately telling the guys to use English only and what they did was wrong. Then you have done the right thing whatever the situation was. The fast reaction is key. If you wait, for example try to benefit from it, you'll be dragged in and become a co-criminal. Your smelling of money will blur your judgement.

Please guys. It should be obvious that the OP is stipulating that they know they are cheating. It was not expecting anyone to factor in the possibility that they weren't.

This thread deserves a separate theory thread to estimate a bound on the winrate of a 2 vs 1 game with no knowledge of their signaling, they play as a team say knowing both hands. They also split profits so they can bet and play wild vs each other if needed to scare hero and it wont matter to them who gets the pot down as long as its them. Maybe over time you recognize that they do that (how? what tests?). So i wonder what the 2vs1 all know its this way game looks like.

Then establish a winrate bound if you know their hands but you need to avoid getting detected that you know it. That is actually an interesting problem. You need to avoid doing statistically unreasonable things so the amount of hands played is a factor in strategy.

Those are both hard questions but they may be possibly answerable in terms of at least bounding them even without knowing full poker theory solution for 2 or 3 people.

Also David what would you be doing in that spot of the OP 3 player case as originally described ?

Right, sorry. I just find hard to resist exploring any and every corner of an ethical choice situation. Considering due process led me astray from your OP.

It matters whether the rule being broken is a moral rule or just a rule of the game/society. The difference between murder/rape and cheating at cards is that the former are wrong in some universal, absolute sense that I don't want to debate, and the latter is wrong according to the conventions of some game. When someone cheats at poker the rules no longer apply, and cheating them back is ok. It's like in logic, F implies F is true. But in morals F is just F.

My general rule is that if someone is purposely harming me to the degree x, on a scale of one to 100, I will do something back with an upper limit of x squared minus 25.

If x is between 1 and 4 you ask them to slap more, just like Christ suggested?

What lesson could be better for a cheater than losing more of the very thing they are trying to gain by cheating.

One could thwart the cheaters for the gain in a session and report them to whoever is running the game afterwards. This would put the maximum pressure on cheaters in terms of consequence depending on the authority running the game. This would also account for player responsibility to game integrity, unless playing against cheaters is against the rules.

Reporting them if possible is smart I think because if they get banned less of all kinds of players will get fleeced in the long run. This would make money for a winning player in theory. Unless you count on cheaters going busto alot before departing. That is contrary to the drive to cheat for advantage. Reasonable to presume a losing cheater would soon depart often enough. Let's be real. Cheaters are gonna cheat at lessons.

And while player responsibility to game integrity gets fuzzy past their own actions, it's still a thing for people and a factor. Even if reporting the cheater is -ev for you, is it more -ev for enough other players to make a factor in your decision. It's a bet against self-interest and for careful table thinking.

If he doesnt understand that he didnt lose that much because he was cheating, he wont understand your lesson. He will just continue to do his thing. If he wins big 80/100 sessions and loses 20/100 he makes a lot of money regardless of you. What Im trying to say is, unless you can really make the cheater lose a meaningfull amount of money, combined with the explaination that he lost because he tried to cheat, Im afraid he wont change his ways.

Actually if you study it here you will see that playing 2 vs 1 in communication is not a such a huge EV compared to playing when you know their cards even in covert mode to not be instantly obvious to them.

He goes all in at some preflop war spot and he has AA and you have KK and you fold never showing or you have in another spot QQ and he hits his Ace at turn when he has AJ and you refuse to pay him folding right away to the turn bet after checking it and then facing bets. Or you set mine instead of re-raising etc.

Imagine having AJ and they have AT and J9s and you push all in preflop after their 3bet. Can they ever possibly call that (plus if they did great lol) ? Would you be ever putting them all in for 100bb with AJ in another case vs a random opponent? Of course not, its very loose risky play. They never get to see what you had.

Imagine them hitting a flush when you have set and you refuse to pay them losing only a minimum symbolic bet to appear you are not entirely seeing what they have instead of losing a stack or half stack.

A ton of cold deck situations are only leading to small losses by you. Alternatively you always know how to bet when you know they are calling you with marginal hands with some equity vs your range when you do not bet a lot. Imagine knowing to never bluff in that spot or if you bluff (to preserve face of not knowing what they have ) to bet a lot less than you would have otherwise.

Basically it may be (crude guess) as much as them having 0.1-0.2bb/h vs you (if you didnt know the language) and you having 3-4bb/h vs them by knowing what they have each time.

They lose to you >20 times what they win with others say both their stacks at least every session. That is possible to happen when you play poker by the way vs a random opponent so its not by itself strange.

So your defense there is going to set them back for 20 others that they cheated or more.

It is a moral obligation of any person to remove funds (without violating the law) from people that are cheaters. They are not going to use those funds generally for good purposes or to do great things. That money deserves to be won by you and put back to society in good solid investments that benefit the world. Feel free to give it to charity or buy books and useful items with them that you intend to somehow give back to the world with your own work.


Statistically people with the poor judgment/ethics to cheat others over such little things as games of poker have the kind of selfish mentality (the aggressive lets exploit the other people because we can, any way we can get an edge, as defacto approach to others) that will do more harm to the world over their lives rather than good. This is only a statistical statement because people change but the bias is significant. And as i explained you can always tell them in the end (if its not a risky situation of possible violence) or even give them back their money if you witness true reform and remorse. Or you can give the money to people you know they cheated. If these guys are real sobs that are criminals with violent trends i will be super happy to destroy the living %#% out of them by the way and never reveal it if it can be done in a way that its not obvious to them as anything other than good luck. If they are super bad villains that can be unpredictably violent then maybe leaving without a comment and calling authorities on them is best. Just use your judgement at all times to do what is better for the world and them at this point. It may not be best for them to get destroyed for example and be permanently banned or land in prison etc (in some other example say). It may be enough sometimes to just lose to you, find out that you know and that what they did is bad and that people will take a stand often enough for crime to not be such a great idea. You can both undermine crime and still refuse to destroy the other person for that crime.

>20 times is only true vs 1 player, often they will play 4-6 players.

Dont get me wrong, if the best I can do is take their money, then Ill do just that. But I kinda hate the idea of that being the best I can do.

Well even then they wont always be in every hand vs all 4-5-6 people. It will be one at a time typically plus they will be unable to play in all hands in a bigger table situation so they have less opportunity to control the situation than in 3ways. Also if this happens vs more than these 2 i will not apply the information gained, i will stop the game in other ways or prevent what they are doing because if i acted like before in the presence of another opponent i am victimizing that random innocent person in a way too.


Proper ethics requires information and improves in guiding proper action based on it. This is how you decide the best you can do. If you knew the guys are cheating because they have a difficult financial problem to solve and they need that money and that their reaction to you taking their stacks as described would be detrimental to their families or other people, you might have acted very differently, even lost on purpose. If i knew that this is the first time they ever did it, i would instantly tell them about it and discourage them to ever do it again, explaining to them all kinds of bad things that can happen to them.

You always adjust based on more information. The reaction to go after a cheater is a statistical decision because you know that the world suffers because such people exist and they are not finding enough resistance by the rest of society. It is also your responsibility to protect the other person from doing the crime. Entrapping them to do the crime may be unethical too if its their first time and you know it. At that moment your priority must be to educate them and make them reconsider this choice rather than calling the authorities and destroying them or taking their money. You always decide these things based on a much more general context often available to you.

If education and opportunity to reform them is a possibility you go for it instead. I would tend to be ferocious only vs people that give plenty of evidence they are general unethical people that would not pay too much attention to any guidance and who can become violent if you call authorities on them etc. Then it is a war i intend to participate in making sure i am not exposed to any risk. I will proceed to lose often to them to keep them happy and deliver the hammer in entirely plausible spots that they will never even imagine i knew what they were doing. If the other side are real bad people you better believe it i will make it a project to destroy them.

Bad people that play near the line/letter of the law and who can avoid going to prison by doing little things here and there without regard for their fellow humans, operating that way consistently over their entire lives, have the capacity to deliver such cumulative and exponentially proliferating damage to society through their effect on other people (persistent betrayal of social contract) that may even exceed that of a single murder event. We are not necessarily talking about such people here of course but i am just making the point that we need to react to crime and undermine its successful implementation because those delivering it often tend to do so over their entire lives in a variety of activities. I think you can help change these people if you have the chance to interact with them for prolonged periods (because they often become that way because society itself or their own lives were hard on them) but in isolated cases the best response i believe is to take a stand until you are in a position to do more.

I agree with you pretty much entirely. But the bolded part is something I kinda dislike, I guess you are meaning something like "cheating can get you in jail", "if you cheat the wrong guys...", but to me this is a bad reason not to hurt other humans. I guess Im searching for a way to improve their ethics and make them a better person, but I probably ask for to much here.

Yes some of the bad (probably worse) things that can happen to them is to succeed in their crime and enter a life of manipulations and find themselves over time doing all kinds of terrible things to others. I would include that also in the list of bad things that start with original "success" of the crime.

Imagine a little kid that once did something and their parents or teachers never took it seriously to further interact with care beyond some superficial punishment or worse indifference. I starts at the playground when you are mean to other kids or when you lie about things etc.

Although i may get tiring to others for quoting the work of Victor Hugo, this clip next is a good example of how you can fight against evil by being more thorough than the blind application of the law when you have the opportunity to interact with people in a more comprehensive manner.




Although this older version is even more interesting;




Full movie also here;




Real life of course proves more challenging, far less effective in winning life turning victories through noble caring human interaction but maybe it is because we gradually built it that way...when the chance/effort was a lot simpler to handle and chose another direction that seemed easier instead. An entire life of failure can be built due to simple laziness at the start by those that could make a difference.

Imo it's better to say "Cheat until cheating becomes -ev" than it is to say "Don't cheat for moral or ethical reasons." That way, its the job of us (those who don't want to be cheated) to make cheating -ev as opposed to it being the agents job not to cheat. We would rather the "cheating is -ev" part be in our hands than the "to cheat or not to cheat" be in his hands.

Don't see how this could be considered cheating since you are using info they are volunteering.

Their underestimation of your knowledge of their language would be the same as their underestimation of your skill level in the game. Not being able to put you on a hand, not being able to put you on a language. To me its the same thing.

This simply is not cheating.

In the real world, I think the two would figure it out pretty fast.

At least two sure ways of sending a thread into total chaos, careening into a rabbit hole of no outlet while simultaneously attracting hoards of nut jobs: mention Hitler/Nazis or the JFK assassination.

Thanks guys.

The Umbrella Man is brilliant. I'd heard of the The Mackintosh Man before. As per usual all things lead back to the British and the weather.

My first thought was that he was listening to the ashes on the radio and England were losing badly.

Sounds more like the Umbrella Man meant to protest perceived weakness in JFK's Cuba policy (bay of pigs), even if - considering the assassination - he didn't want to admit that to the congressional committee years later. The umbrella was meant to say JFK in Cuba was like his father supporting the umbrella carrying Chamberlain's appeasement of Hitler. That would actually make some kind of convoluted sense.


PairTheBoard

this precise situation occurred with a player i know very well. the three of them were in a pot and one says to the other in a foreign language that he has AA to encourage his friend to fold. my friend has two pair on a dry runout and stacks him. (as my friend leaves the table he also says goodbye in the same language.) i have no ethical issues whatsoever with my friend's taking advantage of the information and don't believe for a minute that he cheated.

in fact, if the point of the OP is to posit that cheating a cheater is OK, then it's a poorly framed question because it's unlikely that my friend cheated at all. he merely used all of the available information to defend against a poorly designed attack (MDZ earlier post).

however, if my friend were to break the laws of poker in any way to defend against a cheater then i'd say he's breaking the laws of poker end of story. i could go into my personal reasons why, but it would be a long and boring digression. if my friend cheats to counter a cheat, he is still a cheater.

there's only one situation which I'm not sure about and I'll throw it out there for discussion:

my friend doesn't speak the language but he is 100% sure they are exchanging hole cards. would it be OK for my outstandingly multi-lingual friend to counter the attack by talking in yet another language to his Swahali friend on the right to exchange holecard information, precisely and elegantly countering the cheaters' advantage thus bringing his game back to an equal contest?

i think i'd have no problem with that.

Roberts rules of poker:

"6. If you show cards to an active player during a deal, any player at the table has the right to see those exposed cards."

This rule could be construed as saying that "cheating the cheaters" is ok in this situation. Poker could use a lot more detail on rules and many specific situations.. Check out how much more written detail there is for the proper code of ethical conduct for golf and tennis.

Poker is legal in many places in the US, AND the government is already involved - it regulates the casinos and poker rooms - and in the vast majority of those places, it leaves much of the rule making to the individual establishment.

While I don't think ALL tournament rules should apply to cash games, I do think that standardization of rules is a good thing.

However, good luck getting all 50 States to agree on anything. Getting the government involved doesn't assure a good result, just go to the New England thread and see the mess the NH gov't made of the buy-in rules when they allowed NL to be spread in their poker rooms.