On a per site basis, this will improve the games, regardless of how many sites the regs decide to add.

It won´t be implemented, ever, simply because restricting to 1 table would mean considerably less rake paid. I think 4 is the lower they will go, no further reductions.

It is almost as easy to be a big winner today as it was 15 years ago imo.

How do you think 'household' gets defined in this context? Or, more importantly, gets detected? None of this stops collusion. Do you see why?

Webcam poker never took off before as no-one wants to be on camera degening or get flashed, but now that we have 'filters' which can turn you into any character you want and could easily track/mimic your facial expressions, wouldn't this be a great addition to online poker now?

Imagine a kind of PKR 3D set up where you can see player's expressions in real time, watch them check their cards etc. and you can chat to them like you're in a real casino. Add optional VR capabilities for those who have headsets and you've got an immersive poker experience with a much more secure setup for the site.

Best way to avoid cheaters and bots is to not allow Russians to play.

Reshuffle every folded card is a massive improvement on this. Every site should have it

I think banning multitable is too ****n harsh. You would simply kill MTTs for a living.

Don't let this happen guys. Use the brain, remember all the "big picture" talk you heard through all of your poker journey.

i have an alternative, slightly less complicated solution...go to nearby licensed regulated casino where there isn't and never has been a bot or collusion problem.

My solution for the online problem is a super absorbent "sham wow" towel for online micro grinders playing at gray market sites to cry into every time they get cheated on a site that is literally cheating to stay in existence. birds of a feather...

One way I can think of would be using some sort of headset similar to the VR ones currently in use like the Oculus Quest. This headset is tracking everything. It has cameras on the outside that provide a 3D map of the entire playing area, tracking all physical objects in the environment and they are tracking the user's body as it moves in the environment. They have cameras on the inside tracking head and eye movement, along with a whole host of other sensors tracking a wide array of other stuff.

This is all possible already and being done by headsets currently on the market. There is a solution to be found here but it would require a rebuild form the ground up and a huge amount of investment to leverage it for poker. The experience doesn't necessarily even have to change that much as it could be some sort of AR headset rather than VR where the user is still in the same physical space playing on a laptop/computer. rather than in VR. Even in VR people are now using virtual computers and screens. It would make cheating in any sense almost impossible. No more collusion, no more hole card sharing, and no more RTA.

You solve the war on RTA the same way you solve the war on drugs :-)

Gross, go away with your 3D, headset, webcam, Google glasses...nobody wants that and that will even scare the recreationals. I wanna play online poker in my bed, on the toilet, naked etc.

So the solution is: regulation, strict insight of the community, security bump and huge awareness by the site

You mean liberalizing everything? In a raked game, the cheaters advantage lies on him being the only cheater, or it being a very small club. Every reg doing it means recs losing their shirts and quitting and never coming back faster, then bad regs doing the same, then everyone else starting to compete to breakeven or lose a few bb/100, losing the interest and quitting. Kill the game, no rake for the sites, no profit.

Killing the game, the profits and making people lose interest might be a good thing on the drug issue, though.

I want to play online poker in a safe environment where I am not getting cheating. There is no security or regulation that can stop technology progress and the only way you can combat that is to progress on the other side. We can have tables/games with and without the technology. You can f off to your tables without the tech and enjoy getting cheated and robbed all you like to preserve your right to play naked on the toilet.

I want to play on tables that employ technology no mater what that involves that allows me to feel safe when playing.

real talk. you aren't going to get what you want. the idea that poker sites, which exist only to rake you (and bots) into nonexistence, is going to keep up with security at the pace of AI equipped cheating teams is laughable. the poker sites prob realize at some point it is just bots playing against bots and they are 100% ok with that!!!! the rake still flows.

Chess is having an overwhelming problem with cheating right now.

The TOTAL PRIZE POOL of Titled Tuesday is 5000 USD/week. The ticket for admission is to have a verifiable identity proving you are a person with a professional FIDE title.

In other words it's a relatively high cost to enter, and a relatively low payoff.

The checks they have to do in order to catch cheating are far over the top of what people would ever tolerate to play recreational poker:

Multiple webcams
Live sharing desktop
Live call
No headphones
No extraneous chats
No phones or other communications

They're even making streamers go emote only, which can be a real cost to them.

And even then, your average super GM is convinced that cheating is rampant. Not every decision, every game. But maybe one decision every few games. But it's enough to tilt the balance.

Your typical cheater is looking to do all this to get a few hundred dollars. Risking so much, for that kind of payoff.

If you think online poker, with that much at stake continuously, has a snowball's chance in Hell of being rid of the cheats, you're a very strong optimist.

They don't have any real incentive though to solve the problem in chess. People want to play chess for fun online without any money involved. The main revenue from chess.com is in subscriptions services that act as teaching aids. It much harder to combat too because one decision tilts the balance so much. In poker someone being fed a GTO solution for a particular decision point in a hand matters very little.

Poker dies online without real money games so the sites have a much larger incentive along with the financial rewards from running real money games to try solve the problem.

limon is like one of those facebook karens. its very easy to not have bots. its called kyc and government regulation. if you have to attach your personal bank and identity account to a poker account very few people will be able to cheat and when they do they will be sniffed out quickly and wont be able to again.

Its easy to find a friend to let you bot. its alot harder if they have to use said persons bank account and if they are caught they face legal consequences. Few people are going to let you use their data then. You can also real name and when a random unknown crusher starts playing highstakes its obvious

This is racist against “crypto bros” operating outside “big government”. Stop the fascism!

yea no. not even close. i know what win rates were 15 years ago and i know how little effort it took to achieve them.

so many people were just printing money back then.

very few people print piles today and those who do are either cheating or putting in TONS of work and study.

Thing is Vladimir Kramnik's broader thrust is right. His fixation on Hikaru Nakamura is weird. But the cheating is all over the place.

And it's not just Kramnik who's been vocal about rampant cheating. Daniil Dubov and Fabiano Caruana have been pretty vocal about how bad it is. Magnus Carlsen has famously made his own accusations about OVER THE BOARD cheating, let alone online. Ian Nepomniachtchi has been winking and nodding at most everything Kramnik said. Even Levy Rozman resignedly says "On Titled Tuesday everyone finds the best move."

Basically nobody believes it when Chess.com puts out their Danny Rensch videos claiming that cheating is completely under control.



It is in poker as it is in chess. The sites want you to believe they're doing their best and the cheating just isn't there. You're paranoid.

But it's there and they can't stop it.

Been giving this topic a lot of thought…

I think 2fa or some sort of facial recognition software needs to be implemented. Or finger print verification of some sort.

Also a decentralized poker site could lower the rake for every game. Not sure if that would decrease security of if some sort of ai security team would do a better job than humans.

Yet we see poker has a much smaller cheating problem than chess. In chess you can easily google a bunch of sites that tell you the next best (as far as the computer calculates) move. In poker you have to build a library of sims for thousands of dollars or use a presolved library which can detect you using RTA or code bots which competent security teams would detect.

And there are still a load of things sites can do like make you play on webcam to compare play if suspicious. You're right there will always be some cheating and always has been, but I'm optimistic about the future

There's also the part where Kramnik is a washed up has-been who has been passed by the new generation of engine-trained young GMs and self-biased in that way so more prone to make false accusations of cheating. Same exact effect exists in poker, from your standard 95IQ "online poker is rigged" guy to the moderately good pro who got clowned by someone he underestimated in a spot and cries GTOWiz instead of just swallowing his pride and admitting it. I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just saying that's not all that's going on.

Ya let's make the surveillance state infrastructure even more pronounced than it already is. Instead of just CC and address information to exploit, retinal scans and fingerprints too. Great ****in idea.

I can't online surf though